Are there Providers for Autofac like providers for Ninject?

.net, autofac, dependency-injection, ninject

Solution

I'm looking at Ninject's Providers and the Activation Context and it appears that Providers are an interface to handle scenarios that Autofac would just handle with a lambda. In Ninject's example, they have:

Bind<IWeapon>().ToProvider(new SwordProvider());

abstract class SimpleProvider<T> {
// Simple implementations of the junk that you don't care about...

    public object Create(IContext context) {
        return CreateInstance(context);
    }

    protected abstract T CreateInstance(IContext context);
}

class SwordProvider : SimpleProvider<Sword> {
    protected override Sword CreateInstance(IContext context) {
        Sword sword = new Sword();
        // Do some complex initialization here.
        return sword;
    }
}

All this seems like crazy overkill compared to Autofac's delegate syntax:

builder.Register(context =>
                      {
                           Sword sword = new Sword();
                           // Do some complex initialization here.
                           return sword;
                      }).As<IWeapon>();

EDIT: If your init is complex enough to warrant its own class, you could still do this:

builder.RegisterType<SwordFactory>();
builder.Register(c => c.Resolve<SwordFactory>().Create()).As<IWeapon>();

// this class can be part of your model
public class SwordFactory
{
    public Sword Create()
    {
        Sword sword = new Sword();
        // Do some complex initialization here.
        return sword;
    }
}

Nice thing about this is you're still decoupled from your DI framework.

Problem

Original source