Factories, or Dependency Injection for object instantiation in WCF, when coding against an interface
- by Saajid Ismail
Hi
I am writing a client/server application, where the client is a Windows Forms app, and the server is a WCF service hosted in a Windows Service. Note that I control both sides of the application.
I am trying to implement the practice of coding against an interface: i.e. I have a Shared assembly which is referenced by the client application. This project contains my WCF ServiceContracts and interfaces which will be exposed to clients. I am trying to only expose interfaces to the clients, so that they are only dependant on a contract, not any specific implementation. One of the reasons for doing this is so that I can have my service implementation, and domain change at any time without having to recompile and redeploy the clients. The interfaces/contracts will in this case not change. I only need to recompile and redeploy my WCF service.
The design issue I am facing now, is: on the client, how do I create new instances of objects, e.g. ICustomer, if the client doesn't know about the Customer concrete implementation? I need to create a new customer to be saved to the DB.
Do I use dependency injection, or a Factory class to instantiate new objects, or should I just allow the client to create new instances of concrete implementations?
I am not doing TDD, and I will typically only have one implementation of ICustomer or any other exposed interface.
