Loading the Configuration from Alternative Files

You are not required to store your container configuration in the standard application configuration file: App.config or Web.config. However, if you do store your configuration in a different file you must use the ConfigurationManager methods to explicitly load that specific named file.

For example, in order to load configuration information from the named configuration file, unity.config, you must first load the section, in this case UnityConfigurationSection, as shown in following code. See ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration on MSDN for more details.

using System.Configuration;
var fileMap = new ExeConfigurationFileMap { ExeConfigFilename = "unity.config" };
System.Configuration.Configuration configuration =
    ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration(fileMap, ConfigurationUserLevel.None);
var unitySection = (UnityConfigurationSection)configuration.GetSection("unity");

var container = new UnityContainer()
    .LoadConfiguration(unitySection