Lightweight Containers and Plugin Architectures: Dependency Injection

Required reading: Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern by Martin Fowler. If you haven't read it, you will not understand what I'm talking about, and I'm not fond of reproducing other's work here. It's better if you just read it, it's a very interesting article. I'd like to analyze Fowler's article in the light of .NET and what we have now in v1.x. After reading his article, he seems to imply that lightweight containers are a new concept mainly fuelled by the Java community unsatisfied with heavyweight EJB containers. It turns out that .NET supported and heavily used this approach since its very early bits, released back in PDC'00 (July 14th 2000). The basic building blocks for lightweight containers in .NET live in the System.ComponentModel namespace