Does Ninject Conventions only work for public classes?

Question

I started using Ninject for my project, to automatically bind all subclasses of an abstract class. The binding for this is -- nice and easy -- as follows:

kernel.Bind(x => x.FromThisAssembly()
    .SelectAllClasses().
    .InheritedFrom<AbstractGenerator>()
    .BindBase());

However, I found that this doesn't work. After some experimenting I found that the reason for this not working is that all my implementations (and the abstract class) are marked internal.

I could imagine this to be some security feature, to prevent bindings from leaking internals to the outside. But I can add explicit bindings for these classes. Hence, my question is: Does anybody know whether this is intended behavior? Is there some way to fix this, other than making all my classes public?

Answer 1

Put a .IncludingNonPublicTypes() before the .SelectAllClasses() and your bindings will also work for internal classes.

Also see this question: Cannot get Ninject.Extensions.Conventions to work

I don't think it's about security. I guess it's about design and maybe about performance: choosing from only the public types takes less time than choosing from all types.