UPDATE: This post is pretty old. Please don’t use XML to configure Windsor, unless you’re aware of the nifty fluent registration API, but you absolutely need the runtime-flexibility that XML can offer.

A great pattern in software architecture is dependency injection (DI). It is a classical pattern apparently, but it seems to have become very popular again in TDD circles because of its obvious positive impact on testability. Moreover, I believe it is a healthy architectural exercise to structure your code to support DI, because it enforces separation of concerns.

Dependency injection can be explained like this: if X requires a Y to do its work, X does not create the Y by itself, it is given a Y to use. Thus, DI is an example of inversion of control (IoC), which is a fancy term for whenever you pass something for someone to call functions on.

In the following post, I will give a short example on how to practice DI using the Windsor IoC container.
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