Question

I have seen this line of code in several tutorials for using Unity in asp.net mvc3. I was under the impression that Service Locator is an anti-pattern and not best practice. Is this Service Locator something other than the anti-pattern defined, or is this line of code / this implementation considered bad practice.

ServiceLocator.SetLocatorProvider(() => new UnityServiceLocator(Container));

Answer 1

It is the same anti-patten that people talk about. All that line is doing is setting the service locator provider to be an instance of UnityServiceLocator, i.e. to use the Unity implementation of the ISerivceLocator. Optionally if you would like you can have your own implementation is IServiceLocator and use that instead of UnityServiceLocator.

Using Service Locator is considered a bad practice for various reasons as listed here