What is IoC Container or DI Container

14 Apr 2013

26 Apr 2019

Beginner

119K Views

The terms Dependency Injection (DI) & Inversion of Control (IoC) are generally used interchangeably to describe the same design pattern. Hence some people say IoC Container and some people says DI container but both terms indicate to the same thing. So don't be confused by the terminology.

For more help about DI and IoC see Understanding Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection and Service Locator and Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC using Unity IoC Container.

What is DI Container

A DI Container is a framework to create dependencies and inject them automatically when required. It automatically creates objects based on the request and injects them when required. DI Container helps us to manage dependencies within the application in a simple and easy way.

We can also manage application dependencies without a DI Container, but it will be like as POOR MAN’S DI and we have to do more work, to make it configured and manageable.

List of popular DI Container for .Net

Today, there are a lot of excellent DI Containers that are available for .NET. Here, I am sharing the list of most useful DI Container for .Net framework.

Castle Windsor

Based on the Castle MicroKernel.

Well documented and used by many.

Understands Decorator

Typed factories

Commercial support available

StructureMap

It has been around since June 2004

It is actively developed and works in many cases

Spring.NET

INTERCEPTION

Comprehensive documentation

Commercial support available

Autofac

Easy to learn API

second-generation DI Container

Commercial support available

Unity

INTERCEPTION

Good documentation

Consistent API

Ninject

Easy to learn API
Second-generation DI Container

What do you think?

I hope you will use one of the IoC containers within your .NET application. I would like to have feedback from my blog readers. Your valuable feedback, question, or comments about this article are always welcome.