This week I have been looking at using a dependency injection container for an MVC 2 application.  Since I am using .NET Framework 4 with Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) built in, it is one option to consider.  I have also heard good things about Ninject.  So lets do a quick comparison between Ninject and MEF with the simplest of implementations.

Ninject

To start off, I downloaded the .NET Framework 3.5 release of Ninject assembly and then reference that as I recompile the Ninject.Web.MVC assembly for .NET 4. Then I created a new ASP.NET MVC 2 project and reference those assemblies:

Next I modified the MvcApplication class in Global.asax.cs to inherit from NinjectHttpApplication and use the OnApplicationStarted and CreateKernal overrides to wire Ninject

public class MvcApplication : NinjectHttpApplication
{
    public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Default", // Route name
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
        );

    }

    protected override void OnApplicationStarted()
    {
        AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
        RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);

        RegisterAllControllersIn(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly());
    }

    protected override IKernel CreateKernel()
    {
        var modules = new INinjectModule[]
            {
                new WebModule()
            };

        return new StandardKernel(modules);
    }

 

To associate an interface to an implementation, I create a WebModule class that inherits from NinjectModule:

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