I struggled most of yesterday trying to get Ninject setup in an ASP.NET WebAPI 2.0 environment.

There are multiple Stack Overflow answers and blog posts that all say the same thing:

• Install Ninject in your project from Nuget
• Install Ninject.WebApi
• Install Ninject.WebApi.WebHost

Then everything should just magically work because the WebHost package adds a class (NinjectWebCommon.cs) to your App_Start folder that wires everything up.

Except it didn't. I tried various things, even the alternative method where you change the Global.asax.cs file instead, still nothing.

The code was definitely being called, and if I registered the same Ninject module in my tests, I could pull out a fully configured service. But when running the WebAPI, I would get an exception such as:

An error occurred when trying to create a controller of type 'AccountController'. Make sure that the controller has a parameterless public constructor.  

After much hair-pulling, a colleague stumbled upon another Nuget package called WebApiContrib.IoC.Ninject that I installed and then added 1 line to my NinjectWebCommon.cs class

private static IKernel CreateKernel()  
{
    Kernel = new StandardKernel();
    try
    {
        Kernel.Bind<Func<IKernel>>().ToMethod(ctx => () => new Bootstrapper().Kernel);
        Kernel.Bind<IHttpModule>().To<HttpApplicationInitializationHttpModule>();

        RegisterServices(Kernel);

        //===Add this line===
        System.Web.Http.GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.DependencyResolver = new NinjectResolver(Kernel);
        //===================
        return Kernel;
    }
    catch
    {
        Kernel.Dispose();
        throw;
    }
}

And now it works! So much for "Install the Nuget package and everything will work".
Hope this post save someone else the trouble I had.