I thought of asking on SO, but it seems this is more of a “concept” type question than a “problem” type question. If it needs to be moved, please do so.

Anyway, I’m having a tough time finding straight info on this. I’m using Unity.Mvc3 to setup dependency injection for controllers and other components the controllers might use.

From what I understand from the Unity.Mvc3 website, anything that is IDisposable will be disposed at the end of the request from the container if it is registered with a HierarchicalLifetimeManager.

Does that mean that things registered with the ContainerControlledLifetimeManager will be registered as the same instance for all requests for as long as the server/application is running?

Can I register an instance using the HierarchicalLifetimeManager or does it have to be a type?

How do the application/session/request lifetimes work? I ask, because I come from PHP and PHP has no scope outside the request, so this is obviously something I need to get a hang of.