About the Deliverable

The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection (DI) container. It facilitates building loosely coupled applications and provides developers with the following advantages:

· Simplified object creation, especially for hierarchical object structures and dependencies;

· Abstraction of requirements; this allows developers to specify dependencies at run time or in configuration and simplify management of crosscutting concerns;

· Increased flexibility by deferring component configuration to the container;

· Service location capability; this allows clients to store or cache the container.

Design Goals

· To promote the principles of modular design through aggressive decoupling;

· To raise awareness of the need to maximize testability when designing applications;

· To provide a fast and lightweight dependency injection container mechanism for creating new object instances and managing existing object instances;

· To expose a compact and intuitive API for developers to work with the container;

· To support a wide range of code languages, with method overrides that accept generic parameters where the language supports these;

· To implement attribute-driven injection for constructors, property setters, and methods of target objects;

· To provide extensibility through custom and third-party container extensions;

· To provide the performance required in enterprise-level line-of-business (LOB) applications.

Getting Started

For an introduction to dependency injection, see the article Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern by Martin Fowler.
Two Quickstarts packaged with the release are also a good start.

System Requirements

The following are the minimum system requirements for Unity:

· Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, or Windows Vista operating system

· Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5

· Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 development system

Information on Microsoft patterns & practices

– Visit us at http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/ to see the full line of existing patterns & practices.

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