Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC 3 using Ninject

Since the release of ASP.NET MVC 2, I am learning Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC. I used Microsoft Unity and realized the need for it to simplify ways to handle the dependencies between objects.

I have seen a lot of open source developers using Ninject as a dependency injector and I think I’ll give it a try. In Rob Conery’s MVCStarter, I have seen good implementation of IoC setup using Ninject 2.0 it was good but I have too many works done in MVC application’s Global.asax.cs file. I didn’t like that configuration but I’ve no choice.

With the release of ASP.NET MVC 3 BETA [currently in RC 2] they have made significant changes to the IoC support, please look at Brad Wilson's post, for service location/dependency resolution with MVC, they introduced new interface: System.Web.Mvc.IDependencyResolver. You have to implement this interface within your application and register it with System.Web.Mvc.DependencyResolver’s static method SetResolver(IDependencyResolver resolver).

In Scott Guthrie's post, I have downloaded and study the Ninject implementation of dependency injection and happy with the neat code he wrote. no use of Ninject MVC extension: Ninject.Web.MVC, it is due to the new IoC support in ASP.NET MVC 3.

There are some questions asked regarding it on stackoverflow, So I decided to write a brief post on how to use Ninject 2 in ASP.NET MVC 3.

Prerequisites

you will need to download the latest build of Ninject from here. I download this Ninject-2.1.0.91-RC2-release-net-4.0.zip. You also need the latest release of ASP.NET MVC 3 [RC 2]. If you download the project at the end of this post then you don’t need to download Ninject binaries it’s been provided in the project itself.

Let’s start

Create new project: File –> New –> Project

You can download the ready to run project at the end of this post.

Select ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application as shown below:

After clicking OK you would see new ASP.NET MVC 3 Project dialog asking you to select Template, View Engine and you want Unit Test project or not.

Now you have your new ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application project ready.

For demonstrating dependency injection we need some sort of interfaces and their concrete implementations, so in that regard I will add a new interface named IMessageService and it’s implementation MessageService in the new Services folder to the project root.

Here is the interface IMessageService:

and MessageService:

Now setting up project to introduce dependency injection, this is the time to add a reference to Ninject.dll that you have downloaded as described earlier, if you are lazy like mine then download the project linked at the end of this post.

Now open up Global.asax.cs and add the using Ninject; statement to add a Ninject reference, from ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta and above we have to implement IDependencyResolver for DI work, so It can be implement like this:

Now in the Application_Start(), we want to hook our DI related stuff. for simplicity, like Scott Guthrie did, I’ll add a method which do it all like that:

ok, in the method above I created a standard kernel which is implemented in the Ninject.dll and bind our service to it’s concrete implementation, say whenever the application encounters the IMessageService then it will automatically creates a new instance of MessageService damn simple isn’t it, don’t forget to call above method in Application_Start().

To test it, open up HomeController and change it like that:

First, I add a private readonly field _messageService that holds our service instance on the fly. I also add a class constructor which takes single parameter of type IMessageService and then set it to our private field.

In Index() ActionResult method I called the GetMessage() and we are done, look I didn’t create a new instance of MessageService class anywhere it will automatically created by our DI container.

Now run your application by pressing F5 or Ctrl+F5 you will see:

you see the message above it comes from our MessageService class’s GetMessage() method which I called in HomeController.

Hope you understand how DI works in ASP.NET MVC 3 with Ninject without the need of Ninject.Web.Mvc extension, thanks to the Phil Haack and team.

Now for your comfort, download the ready to run project right now.

Note: I have been learning coding best practices since my early development years, so if you found that I made a mistake here and there then please express it in comments below, I appreciate that and will learn from you.

Enjoy!