Neal started looking into behavior of child containers in Windsor. This is an area that’s very rarely used, and as Hammett wrote two years ago – this is speaking with the devil himself. No one really ever uses it so it never got well defined and as Neil found out there are certain inconsistencies, and grey areas there.

This was a don’t ask, don’t tell area, and since Neil opened that can of worms, it’s time to deal with the issue. I’m considering several solutions, and the one I’m leaning towards most would be probably the most controversial.

Remove support for child containers altogether?

Basically handler selectors and sub-resolvers give you all the power you need to handle scenarios where you would want to use child container instead. I think removing the child containers, and add some nicer support for contextual scoping of components would be the best solution.

The point of this post however is to get your thoughts on this issue. Are you using child containers in Windsor? What are you using it for? How are you using it? Write a comment or if you don’t want to share that in public just drop me an email. I’d really like to get a clean picture of how usage of this feature looks like at this point in time, before I make a decision.