this post of mine is obviously biased by the environment I'm working in (somewhat similar to 37 signals). I'm dealing with projects that are owned by a few developers that also handle deployment to hundreds of machines and maintenance. There is no separation between deployers and developers (it would be too costly in such environment).

I don't argue about getting rid of all dependencies, I'm just suggesting to factor in complexity and friction they bring, while making build vs. make decision, while steering towards overall simplicity and efficiency, if possible.

I do understand that this is a completely different situation to a hosted solution.

So you're basically saying "if you can afford writing it by yourself, even though it's a stripped down edition, write your own".

It might be the right approach indeed, but sometimes rolling your own version comes with its own bag of caveat and bugs. It really depends on whether your team is more skilled or less skilled than the team that builds your external dependency.

I've seen teams that would better just use external deps and write as little code as possible :-)

NB: I used to be Autofac contributor :)

I have to admit though, that autofac would be no improvement over the second version, if you only need static initialisation and VS is your configuration editor.

People say that discarding container was a major improvement and simplification in Lokad.CQRS. NB: I still see it's use for MEF-like functionality.

Re view models: not even table storage, just blobs for now (files for non-Azure). Requires reshaping client context and leads to facebook-like UIs.

In our environment, we have IoC pushed into a corner where it only helps with component wireup. Beyond that, it never reaches anywhere in the architecture. Specifically, nothing has a dependency on the IoC container.

Furthermore, another *huge* advantage to an IoC container, like Autofac, is deterministic disposal. The idea is that resource disposal is handled by the container at each unit of work and then during process shutdown to have a nice, clean application exit.

I also have to ask, are you just using Azure Tables/Blobs now for your storage? Or do you have any other persistence engine for your your view models?