What is IoC Container or DI Container
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.
