Autofac 2.4 Coming Soon

Sometime early in the New Year we’ll be releasing a new version of Autofac.

The star of the show in Autofac 2.4 is a much revamped ASP.NET MVC implementation by Alex Meyer-Gleaves, optimised for use with the MVC3 release. This promises a much quicker, simpler and more robust setup process, finally ridding us of the dependency on an HTTP module (Web.config change) for lifetime control.

Also included in Autofac 2.4 is support for decorators, including some pretty sophisticated coverage of open generic decorator scenarios. In earlier versions of Autofac the very useful Decorator pattern could be a little awkward to implement – I’ll be writing more soon about how Autofac 2.4 tidies this up.

Finally, the new release will continue our recent efforts to improve error messages and bring more consistency and completeness to the APIs introduced in the 2.x series, such as the assembly scanning support. There are no planned breaking changes.

NuGet Packages

Through distribution with ASP.NET MVC3, the NuGet package manager is rapidly gaining traction as the standard way to distribute open source projects for .NET. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of some of the Autofac community there are packages for:

  • Autofac, including its WCF and MEF integrations, for .NET 3.5/4.0 and Silverlight 3/4 (Autofac)

  • Autofac with ASP.NET MVC2 for .NET 3.5/4.0 (Autofac.Mvc2)

  • Autofac with ASP.NET WebForms for .NET 3.5/4.0 (Autofac.Web)

While we expect to fine tune the packages along with the upcoming 2.4 release, you can certainly use NuGet today if you want to use Autofac in your projects.