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Asked: 2026-05-10T13:34:32+00:00

Which C#/.NET Dependency Injection frameworks are worth looking into? And what can you say

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Which C#/.NET Dependency Injection frameworks are worth looking into? And what can you say about their complexity and speed.

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  1. edit (not by the author): There is a comprehensive list of IoC frameworks available at https://github.com/quozd/awesome-dotnet/blob/master/README.md#ioc:

    • Castle Windsor – Castle Windsor is best of breed, mature Inversion of Control container available for .NET and Silverlight
    • Unity – Lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection
    • Autofac – An addictive .NET IoC container
    • DryIoc – Simple, fast all fully featured IoC container.
    • Ninject – The ninja of .NET dependency injectors
    • Spring.Net – Spring.NET is an open source application framework that makes building enterprise .NET applications easier
    • Lamar – A fast IoC container heavily optimized for usage within ASP.NET Core and other .NET server side applications.
    • LightInject – A ultra lightweight IoC container
    • Simple Injector – Simple Injector is an easy-to-use Dependency Injection (DI) library for .NET 4+ that supports Silverlight 4+, Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 including Universal apps and Mono.
    • Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection – The default IoC container for ASP.NET Core applications.
    • Scrutor – Assembly scanning extensions for Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection.
    • VS MEF – Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) implementation used by Visual Studio.
    • TinyIoC – An easy to use, hassle free, Inversion of Control Container for small projects, libraries and beginners alike.
    • Stashbox – A lightweight, fast and portable dependency injection framework for .NET based solutions.

    Original answer follows.

    I suppose I might be being a bit picky here but it’s important to note that DI (Dependency Injection) is a programming pattern and is facilitated by, but does not require, an IoC (Inversion of Control) framework. IoC frameworks just make DI much easier and they provide a host of other benefits over and above DI.

    That being said, I’m sure that’s what you were asking. About IoC Frameworks; I used to use Spring.Net and CastleWindsor a lot, but the real pain in the behind was all that pesky XML config you had to write! They’re pretty much all moving this way now, so I have been using StructureMap for the last year or so, and since it has moved to a fluent config using strongly typed generics and a registry, my pain barrier in using IoC has dropped to below zero! I get an absolute kick out of knowing now that my IoC config is checked at compile-time (for the most part) and I have had nothing but joy with StructureMap and its speed. I won’t say that the others were slow at runtime, but they were more difficult for me to setup and frustration often won the day.

    Update

    I’ve been using Ninject on my latest project and it has been an absolute pleasure to use. Words fail me a bit here, but (as we say in the UK) this framework is ‘the Dogs’. I would highly recommend it for any green fields projects where you want to be up and running quickly. I got all I needed from a fantastic set of Ninject screencasts by Justin Etheredge. I can’t see that retro-fitting Ninject into existing code being a problem at all, but then the same could be said of StructureMap in my experience. It’ll be a tough choice going forward between those two, but I’d rather have competition than stagnation and there’s a decent amount of healthy competition out there.

    Other IoC screencasts can also be found here on Dimecasts.

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