I've been using Structuremap for a few months now, and it has worked great on some smaller (green field) projects. Most of the configurations I have had to set up involve a single implementation per interface. In the cases where I needed to choose a specific implementation at runtime, I created a factory class that used ObjectFactory.GetNamedInstance<>(). In the smaller projects, there were few enough of these cases where I was comfortable with the references to ObjectFactory. My understanding is that you want to limit these references as much as possible, and ideally only reference the ObjectFactory once.
I am working to refactor a larger codebase to use IOC/StructureMap, and am finding that I may need many of these factory classes with ObjectFactory references to get what I need. Essentially, I am creating a "root service" with the ObjectFactory, so that everything in the dependency chain is managed by the container. The root service is created by name (i.e. "BuildCar", "BuildTruck"), and the services needed deeper in the dependency chain could also be constructed using the same name--so the "IAttachWheels" service could vary based on whether a car or truck is being built. Since the class that depends on IAttachWheels is the same in both configurations, I don't think I can use ConstructedBy in the registry to choose the implementation.
Also, to be clear, the IAttachWheels implementations need to be managed by the container as well, because the dependency chain runs fairly deep.
I looked briefly at Profiles as an option, but read (here on StackOverflow) that changing profiles essentially changes implementations for all threads. Is there a feature that is similar to profiles that is thread/request specific? Is the factory class that references ObjectFactory approach the right way to go?
Any thoughts would be appreciated.