I’ve been using Castle Windsor in my previous project and I liked it a lot. For my current project I’m looking to use a different IoC container. Castle Windsor hasn’t had any new releases since 2007 and is still not at version 1.0 so it is hard to justify using it in a commercial environment.
One of the things I like about Castle Windsor is that you can have the container call an Initialize method on your services after all dependencies have been set simply by making the service implement IInitializable. I used this a lot. It makes it easy to do property injection instead of constructor injection and that cleans up code and tests quite a bit.
I’ve been looking at StructureMap, AutoFac, Unity and Spring.Net as alternatives but of these only Spring.Net supports something similar, it automatically calls an Init() method. Unfortunately Spring.Net does not really support the way I want to work with an IoC container (it injects based on string keys instead of interface declarations and therefore its autowiring support is limited too)
Did I miss a similar feature in the IoC containers I looked at? Is my way of working with IoC containers wrong somehow? Or are there other IoC containers that do support something like IInitializable or Init()?
Autofac can do it – they call it Startable