Wingman

General-purpose C# assistance library.

Includes support for WPF with Caliburn.Micro.

NuGet

Wingman is on NuGet.

To install the latest version, open PowerShell in your project directory, and simply run:

Install-Package Wingman

Wingman has several sub-packages. The main package installs all of them, but you can install any of the sub-packages individually:

Install-Package Wingman.DI
Install-Package Wingman.Services
Install-Package Wingman.WPF

The packages have inter-dependencies. For example, Wingman.WPF will always install Wingman.DI.

Supported .NET Framework Versions

We target a varying range of .NET Framework versions from v4.0 to v4.8, so all of your projects from April 2010 forwards should work with Wingman.

For frameworks v4.5 - v4.7, the base release and latest release are targeted, however not release v4.x.1. This means that for these frameworks, v4.x.1 projects will target the v4.x release of Wingman.

Please keep in mind that .NET 4.0 projects cannot be mocked with Moq, so the release target isn't tested, however it compiles.

Release Date	Framework Version	Supported	Targeted	Tested
13^th February 2002	v1.0	❌	❌	❌
24^th April 2003	v1.1	❌	❌	❌
07^th November 2005	v2.0	❌	❌	❌
06^th November 2006	v3.0	❌	❌	❌
19^th November 2007	v3.5	❌	❌	❌
12^th April 2010	v4.0	✅	✅	❌
15^th August 2012	v4.5	✅	✅	✅
17^th October 2013	v4.5.1	✅	❌	❌
05^th May 2014	v4.5.2	✅	✅	✅
20^th July 2015	v4.6	✅	✅	✅
30^th November 2015	v4.6.1	✅	❌	❌
02^nd August 2016	v4.6.2	✅	✅	✅
05^th April 2017	v4.7	✅	✅	✅
17^th October 2017	v4.7.1	✅	❌	❌
30^th April 2018	v4.7.2	✅	✅	✅
18^th April 2019	v4.8	✅	✅	✅

The .NET Standard, and .NET Core and Mono are not currently supported.

How to Use Wingman

Wingman currently includes basic support for Caliburn.Micro.

BootstrapperBase

The author includes a BootstrapperBase base implementation which allows bootstrapping with a minimal amount of code.

The most basic bootstrapper might looks like this:

using Wingman.Bootstrapper;
using Wingman.Container;

class Bootstrapper : BootstrapperBase<IShellViewModel>
{
    protected override void RegisterViewModels(IDependencyRegistrar dependencyRegistrar)
    {
        dependencyRegistrar.Singleton<IShellViewModel, ShellViewModel>();
    }
}

As you may have noticed, one of the BootstrapperBase classes accepts a single generic parameter - the root ViewModel to use for DisplayRootViewModel.

RegisterViewModels is an abstract method because the root ViewModel (IShellViewModel in this case) must always be registered with the dependency registrar, otherwise the root view cannot be displayed by Caliburn. The BootstrapperBase will throw if the root ViewModel isn't registered!

BootstrapperBase will also register two additional dependencies for you automatically:

An IWindowManager implementation (from Caliburn)
- This serves to spawn windows and is always necessary.
An IServiceFactory implementation
- This is a convenience general-purpose factory, provided by Wingman, described in its own section.

Caliburn's container bootstrapping methods have been overridden and sealed by Wingman, and they delegate all calls to IDependencyRetriever.

The Configure method has also been sealed, and calls these methods in order:

RegisterViewModels(IDependencyRegistrar dependencyRegistrar);
RegisterServices(IDependencyRegistrar dependencyRegistrar);

RegisterFactoryViewModels(IServiceFactoryRegistrar dependencyRegistrar);
RegisterFactoryServices(IServiceFactoryRegistrar dependencyRegistrar);

The first two methods are simply used to register dependencies with the default container. TRootViewModel must be registered in RegisterViewModels, however, apart from that, there is nothing to stop you from registering services in the first method, and ViewModels in the second. The convention was created to make registration easier to read, as there are usually two separate clusters of registrations in the Configure method.

The Factory versions of these methods relate to registering with IServiceFactory, which is described in its own section.

Wingman also overrides OnStartup using the "template method" pattern, and displays the root view for the ViewModel templated when inheriting BootstrapperBase.

You can override these two method to take action before or after displaying the root view, respectively:

OnStartupBeforeDisplayRootView(object sender, StartupEventArgs e);
OnStartupAfterDisplayRootView(object sender, StartupEventArgs e);

All other BootstrapperBase methods have been left intact as per Caliburn's implementations.

Wingman's BootstrapperBase implementation aims to reduce hassle when setting up a new project, ensuring that the app has been bootstrapped properly by throwing descriptive exceptions early on during the startup phase.

DependencyContainer

As you may have noted, Wingman includes two dependency interfaces - IDependencyRegistrar and IDependencyRetriever. These serve to register and retrieve dependencies from a dependency container. The interfaces have largely been based on the SimpleContainer implementation in Caliburn.

The interfaces are split due to the fact that registrations and retrieval from the dependency container often happen separately, which means that too much information is passed to consumers that do not use both concepts.

Wingman comes with a default implementation of these two interfaces (DependencyContainer), which can be instantiated via DependencyContainerFactory.Create(). DependencyContainer also implements IDependencyActivator, a simple event that is raised when an instance is created from the container, which isn't used by Wingman specifically, but is present in Caliburn's SimpleContainer implementation.

Any custom implementations of these interfaces can either manually implement IDependencyRegistrar and/or IDependencyRetriever, or derive the DependencyContainerBase class which implements both interfaces and the convenience generic methods defined in the interfaces. IDependencyActivator is optional.

For custom container implementations, you must pass instances of your registrar and retriever to the base constructor of BootstrapperBase:

using Wingman.Bootstrapper;
using Wingman.Container;

class Bootstrapper : BootstrapperBase<IShellViewModel>
{
    public Bootstrapper() : base(MyCustomContainerRegistrar.Instance, MyCustomContainerRetriever.Instance)
    {
    }

    protected override void RegisterViewModels(IDependencyRegistrar dependencyRegistrar)
    {
        dependencyRegistrar.Singleton<IShellViewModel, ShellViewModel>();
    }
}

Custom implementations may be necessary when using different dependency containers, such as Castle Windsor and Ninject.

Wingman may introduce custom implementations for these containers in the future. If you happen to implement one of these, feel free to send a pull request! (Include unit tests!)

ServiceFactory

Wingman provides a general-purpose factory, which can generate implementations with dependencies as well as arguments. Unfortunately, to make the process simple, arguments are weakly-typed, passed as an object[].

The ServiceFactory is split into two interfaces:

IServiceFactoryRegistrar
- Registers dependency creation strategies with the factory.
IServiceFactory
- Generates instances of registered services via the appropriate strategy.

The default implementations of these interfaces are ServiceFactoryRegistrar and ServiceFactory (respectively), and they can both be instantiated via ServiceFactoryFactory.Create(IDependencyRegistrar, IDependencyRetriever). A pair of objects are returned, IServiceFactoryRegistrar Registrar and IServiceFactory Factory. The purpose of the registrar being a separate object is so that the registrar is allocated once at startup, all the dependencies are swiftly registered, and the registrar is garbage-collected, releasing all registration-related class instances.

The BootstrapperBase class already takes care of instantiating and registering the factory with the default dependency container.

Creating a service instance is as simple as this:

class MyService
{
    private readonly ISomeService _someService;

    public MyService(IServiceFactory serviceFactory)
    {
        _someService = serviceFactory.Create<ISomeService>(somePieceOfData);
    }
}

There are two strategies for registering services:

FromContainer
PerRequest

FromContainer

The FromContainer strategy will simply retrieve the service from the container, letting the container do any dependency resolution. This means that you cannot pass any arguments to the service being created (an exception will throw!).

FromContainer dependencies only need an interface registration with the factory, and must be registered with the dependency container beforehand:

using Wingman.Bootstrapper;
using Wingman.Container;
using Wingman.ServiceFactory;

class Bootstrapper : BootstrapperBase<IShellViewModel>
{
    protected override void RegisterViewModels(IDependencyRegistrar dependencyRegistrar)
    {
        dependencyRegistrar.Singleton<IShellViewModel, ShellViewModel>();
    }
    
    protected override void RegisterServices(IDependencyRegistrar dependencyRegistrar)
    {
        // Any registration strategy applies here, Singleton is just used by default
        dependencyRegistrar.Singleton<IService, ServiceImpl>();
    }
    
    protected override void RegisterFactoryServices(IServiceFactoryRegistrar serviceFactoryRegistrar)
    {
        serviceFactoryRegistrar.FromContainer<IService>();
    }
}

The default IServiceFactoryRegistrar will throw if the FromContainer service hasn't been registered with the IDependencyRegistrar!

The above registration means a use like this applies:

serviceFactory.Create<IService>();

However, this will throw:

serviceFactory.Create<IService>(argument1, argument2); // Cannot pass arguments to FromContainer registrations

PerRequest

The PerRequest strategy will resolve all dependencies, and then inject constructor parameters.

Take the following service:

class ServiceImpl : IService
{
    public ServiceImpl(IDependency dependency, IDependency2 dependency2, string myName)
    {
        // blah
    }
}

You can create it like this:

serviceFactory.Create<IService>("You are called ServiceImpl.");

The dependencies will be resolved automagically.

The above usage implies this kind of registration:

using Wingman.Bootstrapper;
using Wingman.Container;
using Wingman.ServiceFactory;

class Bootstrapper : BootstrapperBase<IShellViewModel>
{
    protected override void RegisterViewModels(IDependencyRegistrar dependencyRegistrar)
    {
        dependencyRegistrar.Singleton<IShellViewModel, ShellViewModel>();
    }
    
    protected override void RegisterServices(IDependencyRegistrar dependencyRegistrar)
    {
        // Any registration strategy applies here, Singleton is just used by default
        dependencyRegistrar.Singleton<IDependency, DependencyImpl>();
        dependencyRegistrar.Singleton<IDependency2, Dependency2Impl>();
    }
    
    protected override void RegisterFactoryServices(IServiceFactoryRegistrar serviceFactoryRegistrar)
    {
        serviceFactoryRegistrar.PerRequest<IService, ServiceImpl>();
    }
}

Alternative Use

ServiceFactory can be used outside of WPF and Caliburn.Micro projects, however the default implementation depends on IDependencyRetriever, which may be a slightly restrictive interface, due to its Caliburn-oriented nature.

Should you wish to use the ServiceFactory in other contexts, it will still work equally as well, however you might need custom implementations of IDependencyRetriever for your specific dependency container (see the DependencyContainer section).

Feel free to post pull requests or issues of such usages, informing the author of ways the library can be shaped to facilitate ease of such use.

Aleksbgbg / Wingman