Introductory videos on IOC containers

Posted at 07:00 on 10 May 2010

Dependency injection is one of those concepts in computer programming that looks weird and complex when you don’t understand it, but once you do, you wonder how you managed without it. A bit like distributed source control. Unfortunately, if you don’t understand it properly and implement it incorrectly, you can end up losing the benefits of it and end up wondering, “What was the point?”

For developers new to the concept, David Hayden has a series of video tutorials that provide what’s probably the best introduction to it that I’ve come across. He uses Microsoft’s Unity Container for most of his examples, but the concepts can easily be adapted for other libraries such as Ninject, Autofac, or Castle Windsor. He explains in some detail how to use them properly within both ASP.NET and WebForms, and demonstrates what kind of things they can achieve:

• Unity IoC and Dependency Injection Screencast
• Unity IoC and ASP.NET Screencast - Dependency Injection into Web Pages
• Unity and ASP.NET Web Pages Dependency Injection Part II with Special Guests - Autofac and Ninject
• Unity IoC and ASP.NET MVC Framework - Dependency Injection of Controllers
• Unity Nested Containers - IUnityParentContainer and CreateChildContainer
• UnityContainer and UnityConfigurationSection - Populating Unity Container via App.config or Web.config
• Unity IoC Dependency Injection and ASP.NET Model-View-Presenter