OK, so I figure it's 6am - in the interests of personal education, and possible improvement of my framework for my client, I decide I best get down and dirty with Unity and see how simple it is to replace Windsor in our current application.  If it is simple, and it makes the application simpler, then I'll go the Unity route (as a MS fanboi I really do prefer the MS option where all other factors are equal). Some debate on altdotnet made me consider my position on it.

Unity is roughly comparable to IoC containers like Windsor and StructureMap, the CodePlex site description says:

The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection.

So ... I download the project from CodePlex ... and double click the solution file ...

I only have VS2008 Development Edition on this laptop, no VS2005, so a conversion is required. OK - I have done this before - it should work right, after all CodePlex says:

You can modify or extend the Unity Application Block using Visual Studio 2008. When you open a solution, Visual Studio 2008 will upgrade the projects to its format and you can edit and compile the code to create assemblies targeted at version 3.0 of the .NET Framework. However, you will not be able to convert the projects back into Visual Studio 2005 format. Therefore, it is a good idea to work with a copy of the original solutions and projects.

Guess what ... the conversion fails. Well mostly it works, but all of the Unit Test projects fail to convert. Come on MS ... these are your things ... your IDE, your conversion wizard, your CodePlex project, and your unit testing framework - this is not rocket science.

OK - I'll give you a little leeway as Unity is a CTP ...

So I close it down after struggling a little with the sample applications when I don't have unit tests to read (more on the sample apps shortly). Go and read CodePlex for 20 mins to try and see if anyone has these problems, but with no luck.

I brace myself to figure this stuff out without unit tests, and double click the solution again. It now tells me it needs to do a conversion. Deja Vu moment ... surely I just converted it already ... maybe I was dreaming. I tell it to do the conversion, and bingo it converts successfully, including all the unit test projects it failed to convert 20 minutes ago.

Inconsistent behaviour annoys me ... either fail to convert every damn time, or work every damn time, but don't pick and choose based on some ethereal criteria I am unaware of!

Right ... I have a full solution loaded ... lets compile this and see it fly ...

Nice idea ... except VS thinks otherwise ... all references to using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting are showing red in the test projects. All references are broken ... they point to Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework correctly, but they show pointing to version 0.0.0.0 which I guess is the VS2005 reference misbehaving in VS2008 ... so I have to manually update each reference, either by changing the "Specific Version" property to false in which case it auto picks the version 9.0 assembly, or by removing the reference and re-adding it (and we all know how tedious that is to do).

Why????? Why make me go through all this to see Unity, when every tool I was using was from MS ???

I understand it isn't entirely the fault of the Unity team here, but surely you guys are in the best possible position to know about the way each others products work.

I choose MS products because I expect them to *just work* out of the box ... I choose certain OSS products expecting them to not be packaged as nicely, or as well documented, and expect a few niggles.

So I have wasted at least 30 minutes on Unity already, and haven't read any code. Please Microsoft, make your things play nicely with each other ... is that too much to ask?

Right ... off to actually see how Unity works, and how it can make my life easier now ...