I was recently reading a fairly detailed comparison by Andrey Shchekin of the various injection containers out there in the .NET space.  I found it interesting that the last feature he regarded as important was the ability to tell the container to mock a particular object.  Now, when I wrote an article about evaluating IoC containers, it didn't even occur to me to include this.  Now, Andrey includes many points that I haven't covered, like the fact that Castle hasn't had a stable release in well over a year, but on this point I think it's best left out....

I thought I'd write a bit about how I understand the philosophy of IoC containers.  I realize I'm actually building up to something that I started talking about a while ago.  I'm probably not saying anything that Martin Fowler didn't say before, but I have my own slant on it.  To start off with, I'd like to just review what we actually mean by various terms: Inversion of Control (IoC) is a general name for the pattern where an object isn't responsible for managing the lifecycle of the services it uses.  The simplest way to implement this (in .NET)...