In the last post I talked a bit about how “Convention over Configuration” is applied to container registration in the StoryTeller trunk. Another neat convention which can be found in the bootstrapping process of StoryTeller is a convention around startable instances .

Each instance in the StoryTeller assemblies whose contract applies to StructureMaps default convention and also contains the IStartable interface is automatically resolved and started during bootstrapping.

For example: If you’ve defined an IModuleLoaderService contract

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public interface IStartable
{
  void Start();
}

public interface IModuleLoaderService : IStartable { }

and an implementation for it

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public class ModuleLoaderService : IModuleLoaderService
{
  public void Start()
  { ... }
}

the convention will automatically resolve that implementation and call the Start() method on it. All of this is done by this little piece of code:

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ObjectFactory.Model.PluginType
  .Where(p => p.IsStartable())
  .Select(p => p.ToStartable())
  .Each(x => x.Start());

The code itself is not that hard to understand. A bit LINQ combined with two extension methods. The first one IsStartable() finds all known known contracts (the plugin type) in the dependency graph who are assignable to the IStartable type, while the second one (ToStartable()) simply resolves any found contract type with the help of the container.

Short, simple and easy to remember ==> Love it