Adapters

An adapter takes the one service contract and adapts it to another.

When an adapter is registered with Autofac, a separate adapter will be created for every implementation of the adapted service.

This introductory article describes how adapters are implemented with Autofac.

Decorators

A decorator is like an adapter in that it wraps implementations of a specific service, but in contrast to adapters, decorators expose the same service as they decorate.

See this article for details on the decorator support added in Autofac 2.4.