Dependency Injection in WCF services

Question

I am trying to bend my mind around WCF and Dependency Injection is a point that confuses me a bit.

My question is basically: Does WCF support Dependency Injection out of the box, or does one have to rely on some external framework for that?

If there is a way to do this using nothing but WCF, could you give me a link to a simple example?

Answer 1

WCF says nothing about dependency injection as such. Usually you need to use a framework like Unity or StructureMap or Ninject or Castle Windsor to do it.

There are other messages here about how to do it.

Answer 2

Check out this blog post by Jimmy Bogard about hooking StructureMap into the WCF integration points that allows him to not have constructor-less service constructors. I know that you're looking for a non-DI Framework, so if you use the approaches provided in the links from Peter K's comment to his answer and combine the roll-you-own DI container with WCF's integration points with IInstanceProvider and IServiceBehavior as described by Jimmy, you should have a DI solution for WCF that doesn't use a third-party DI framework.

It's definitely isn't a 5-minute exercise and will require a bit of code, but hopefully this helps. Let me know if you have questions and I'll update this response. Good luck!