Many thanks to the original source by ArtisanCode on GitHub I’ve enjoyed for solving this problem. You may also enjoy Radenko’s post and Raymund’s post. I hope that you will find what I have learned from these sources helpful. The requirement was running ASP.NET MVC and Web API in the same project with a single inversion of control (IoC) container shared by both, though I never ended up using injection for my MVC controllers as I had planned.

My personal preference in the past has been Castle Windsor, in part because I like the ability to do interception so easily. More on interception in a future post. For now, have a look at how easy it is to wire up. First, we wire up the container in the Application_Start method in your Global.asax.cs class that inherits from System.Web.HttpApplication:

IoC.Instance.Container.Install(new DependencyConfig());
IoC.Instance.Container.BeginScope();	
GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.DependencyResolver = 
   new CastleDependencyResolver(IoC.Instance.Container);

Then we wire up the DependencyConfig class mentioned in the above snippet.

public class DependencyConfig : IWindsorInstaller
{
   public void Install(IWindsorContainer container, IConfigurationStore store)
   {
      //... config stuff ... blah blah blah

      //register a component with a custom interceptor for capturing some aspect
      container.Register(Component.For<IMyComponent>()
         .ImplementedBy<MyComponent>()
         .LifestyleSingleton()
         .Interceptors(InterceptorReference.ForType<MyInterceptor>())
         .Anywhere);

And implement your interceptor with something like this:

public class MyInterceptor : IInterceptor
{
   public void Intercept(IInvocation invocation)
   {
      //do something before the call is executed
      //execute the call
      invocation.Proceed();
	  //do something after the call is executed
   }
}

Now put it all together and you have ApiControllers injecting your components for you. And you can get components directly when you need them using the IoC singleton I wrote like this:

var mycomp = IoC.Instance.Container.Resolve<IMyComponent>();

Here’s the IoC singleton:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using Castle.Windsor;

namespace MyCastle
{
   public class IoC
   {
      private static volatile IoC _instance;
      private static object _syncRoot = new object();

      private readonly WindsorContainer container;

      private IoC()
      {
         container = new WindsorContainer();
      }

      public static IoC Instance
      {
         get
         {
            if (null == _instance)
            {
               lock (_syncRoot)
               {
                  if (null == _instance)
                  {
                     _instance = new IoC();
                  }
               }
            }
            return _instance;
         }
      }

      public WindsorContainer Container { get { return container; } }
   }
}

And where does the CastleDependencyResolver and CastleDependencyScope classes come from? That’s the fun part. First, you’ll need two NuGet packages:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<packages>
  <package id="Castle.Core" version="3.3.3" targetFramework="net45" />
  <package id="Castle.Windsor" version="3.3.0" targetFramework="net45" />
</packages>

Then you just need the ArtisanCode code for those two classes. For my own use, I’ve modified them a bit in my own projects but you may find that you can use them right out of the box or even adopt the entire WebApiCastleIntegration library.

There you have it.