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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T11:32:12+00:00

I read a really cool blog about using Autofac to completely decouple an application

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I read a really cool blog about using Autofac to completely decouple an application. But try as I might (and being horribly new to all this), I just couldn’t get Autofac to gel.

I turned to Unity from the MS Patterns & Practices Enterprise Library and that went a whole lot better. To make things unnecessarily hard for myself, I separated out all my stuff into projects as:

  • UnityDi (Console app)
  • UnityDi.Contracts (Interfaces)
  • UntiyDi.Domain (Classes)
  • UnityDi.Repositories (Data Access)
  • UnityDi.Services (Access to repository through a service layer)

I used XML configuration to pony up Unity:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <configSections>
        <section name="unity" type="Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration.UnityConfigurationSection, Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration" />
    </configSections>
    <unity xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/practices/2010/unity">
        <assembly name="UnityDi.Contracts" />
        <assembly name="UnityDi.Domain" />
        <assembly name="UnityDi.Services" />
        <assembly name="UnityDi.Repositories" />
        <namespace name="UnityDi.Contracts" />
        <namespace name="UnityDi.Domain" />
        <namespace name="UnityDi.Services" />
        <namespace name="UnityDi.Repositories" />
        <container>
            <register type="IUser" mapTo="User"></register>
            <register type="IUserService" mapTo="UserService"></register>
            <register type="IUserRepository" mapTo="UserRepository"></register>
        </container>
    </unity>
</configuration>

And got that into a running app, no worries:

private static readonly IUnityContainer Container = new UnityContainer();
...
Container.LoadConfiguration();

BUT in order to do so, I need a reference to all the above projects from my console app.

Is there a way to make the app only ever have a reference to UnityDi.Contracts (the interfaces)? Then the app is well and truly decoupled (admittedly with a sledgehammer).

I hope that is enough of an explanation, I’m totally new to this and I’m being extreme like this to facilitate better learning.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I suspect the reason it looks like you need project references is that without them, VS won’t copy the assemblies into your apps bin folder when you hit F5. How would it, it has no way of knowing you need them!

    The project references are the quickest solution to the problem. The other thing you could do is add a post-build step to copy the appropriate DLLs to end up in the right directory so you can run the app.

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