Using Ninject with MVC6

ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6 are currently release candidates so the information in this post may change.

Gettting Ninject working with ASP.NET 5 (also known as vNext) is really simple. Unfortunately it took me the best part of a day to to work this out as a lot of the documentation is either a work in progress or out of date (beta 4 renamed quite a few packages and methods).

The ASP.NET framework now supports DI out of the box in the Microsoft.Framework.DependencyInjection package. However if you want to use Autofac or Ninject - maybe because you already use them throughout the rest of your project - you’ll need an adapter.

Standard Ninject binding

The Ninject adapter package isn’t yet available on NuGet so you’ll need to add the ASP.NET 5 “master” branch feed from MyGet to your Visual Studio NuGet package sources.

• In Visual Studio under Tools → Options → NuGet Package Manager add the feed

  https://www.myget.org/F/aspnetmaster/
  

• Add the Microsoft.Framework.DependencyInjection.Ninject and Ninject packages to your project.json file (or use NuGet).

• Set up Ninject in Startup.cs

  // You probably need to change this return type - defaults to void
  public IServiceProvider ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
  {
    // Add your various services such as MVC as normal
    services.AddMvc();
  
    // Create a new Ninject kernel for your bindings
    var kernel = new StandardKernel();
  
    // Set up your bindings for DI
    kernel.Bind<IFakeRepo>().To<FakeRepo>().InRequestScope();
      
    // Add all the ASP.NET services to your Ninject kernel
    kernel.Populate(services);
  
    // Use Ninject to return an instance
    return kernel.Get<IServiceProvider>();
  }
  

Convention based binding

At work we tend to use Ninject convention based binding as it saves manually listing all the Interface/Repository combinations (it can get a bit tedious). You essentially tell Ninject what namespaces to look in and it will bind all classes to their default interfaces.

• Add the ninject.extensions.conventions NuGet package

• Set up convention based binding in Startup.cs

public IServiceProvider ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    services.AddMvc();

    var kernel = new StandardKernel();

    // This bit is the convention based binding
    // 
    // Any repository will do here it's just to find the correct DLL.
    kernel.Bind(k => k.FromAssemblyContaining<FakeRepo>() 
        .SelectAllClasses()
        // List multiple types here to look in more than one namespace
        .InNamespaceOf(typeof(FakeRepo)) 
        .BindDefaultInterfaces()
        .Configure(c => c.InRequestScope()));

    kernel.Populate(services);
    return kernel.Get<IServiceProvider>();
}