Lamar v6 is out! Expanded interception options, overriding test services, better documentation

Lamar is a modern IoC container library that is optimized for usage within .Net Core / .Net 5/6 applications and natively implements the .Net DI abstractions (AddTransient/Singleton/Scoped() etc). Lamar was specifically built to be a much higher performance version of the old StructureMap library with similar usage for relatively easy migration.

Lamar v6.0.0 went live today. It’s not a very large release at all, but I took this opportunity to tuck some previously public types into being internal to clean up your Intellisense and eliminated some obsolete public members. I don’t anticipate any changes in your code for the mass majority of Lamar users upgrading.

The highlights of this release are:

• Lamar’s documentation website got a big facelift as it moved from an old Bootstrap theme with my old stdocs tool to using Vitepress and mdsnippets. I also did a sweep to remove old StructureMap nomenclature and replace that with the newer Lamar nomenclature that very purposely mimics the .Net DI abstraction terminology.
• New functionality to reliably override service registrations at container creation time. This was specifically meant for automated integration testing where you may want to override specific service registrations. This hasn’t been a straightforward thing in the past because the generic host builder applies service registrations from Startup classes last no matter what, and that defeated many efforts to override services in testing.
• AaronAllBright contributed an important pull request for some missing activation features. That was expanded into a full blown interception and activation feature set to go along with the support for decorators in Lamar v1+. That’s been a frequent concern for folks looking to move off of StructureMap and one of the biggest remaining features in Lamar’s backlog, so mark that one off.
• A couple bug fixes, but I think this is the only big one.
• I stopped and modernized the devops a bit to replace the old Rake build with Bullseye & SimpleExec. I also moved the CI from AppVeyor to GitHub actions. I wouldn’t say that either move was a big deal, but it is nice having the CI information right in the GitHub website.