I should’ve figured out myself, that the lambda will do the trick by pulling the component out of the current context.

This elegant flexibility is awesome! And that specific implementation is a great solution to the MicroKernel’s problem (their dependency resolution takes place in the context where the component has been registered).

I’ll definitely spend a bit more time with the autofac IoC.

ContainerBuilder cb = new ContainerBuilder();
cb.Register(c => new A(c.Resolve<B>()))
  .WithScope(InstanceScope.Factory);

Container parent = cb.Build();

Container child = cb.CreateInnerContainer();
ContainerBuilder childBuilder = new ContainerBuilder();
childBuilder.Register(c => new B());
childBuilder.Build(child);

A a = child.Resolve<A>();

Thanks for your comment over on my blog. I’m glad autofac makes sense to you :)

The scenario you’ve described (at a first glance) looks very straightforward in Autofac to me:

ContainerBuilder cb = new ContainerBuilder();
cb.Register(c => new A(c.Resolve<B>()))
.WithScope(InstanceScope.Factory);

Container parent = cb.Build();

Container child = cb.CreateInnerContainer();
ContainerBuilder childBuilder = new ContainerBuilder();
childBuilder.Register(c => new B());
childBuilder.Build(child);

A a = child.Resolve<A>(); // will now work as you expect.

What you’ve touched on is exactly the reason that the expressions take the container (through IContext) as their first argument, rather than use a closure to resolve dependencies from the container. When the resolve is done in the child scope, the _child_ container will be passed as the argument to the expression creating A.

Happy to go into this further if you’re interested.

Nick