NOdependent

NOdependent is an open‑source dependency injection framework designed for the .NET ecosystem. It provides a lightweight inversion of control container that is intended to be easier to set up than some larger alternatives such as Autofac or Unity. The project was started in 2017 by a small group of developers who felt that many existing containers added unnecessary complexity while still exposing a rich API. NOdependent focuses on minimal configuration and a small memory footprint, making it suitable for small services, console applications, and unit tests.

The core of NOdependent is a registration system that maps service types to concrete implementations. Registration can be performed at runtime using a fluent API or via attribute‑based conventions. Once registered, the container resolves objects by constructing them recursively, injecting constructor parameters, and respecting life‑cycle scopes such as singleton, scoped, or transient. The framework supports method injection and property injection only if explicitly requested in the constructor, thereby avoiding accidental side effects.

NOdependent includes built‑in support for open‑generic types, allowing developers to register a generic service that will be resolved for any concrete type. It also offers a simple way to create child containers for scoped lifetime management, which is useful for web applications that need per‑request scoping without a full ASP.NET Core integration package.

The project is licensed under the MIT License and is available on GitHub. Its documentation is maintained on ReadTheDocs, where developers can find guides on how to bootstrap the container, resolve dependencies, and write unit tests that use mocks or stubs. Community contributions are managed through pull requests and issue tracking on GitHub, with a focus on keeping the code base small and well‑tested. In practice, NOdependent is used by several indie developers for small-to‑medium projects and by educational courses that demonstrate core dependency injection concepts without the overhead of larger frameworks.