Spring has arrived!

In the land down-under, it is springtime. The birds are chirping louder, the days are getting longer, and the sun is getting hotter. I even got sunburnt playing soccer on Sunday :).

And for .Net developers Spring in another form has arrived in joyous splendor... Spring.Net 0.6 RC1 has been released.

The arrival of Spring.Net gives .Net developers another solid choice on the road to more loosely coupled component-based systems. Spring.Net will soon be MUCH more than just a lightweight container, but even just as a lightweight dependency injection container it is an excellent offering for the .Net development community.

Martin Fowler’s recent article on lightweight containers and dependency injection highlighted two excellent Java offerings; Spring and PicoContainer. Now both of these alternatives are available to the .Net world.

Whether you use a dedicated dependency injection container like PicoContainer, a service locator offering like .Net's own System.ComponentModel namespace, a pluggable model like the provider pattern, or a dependency injection container ‘with more’ like Spring.Net the important goal of separating configuration from use during .Net software development has never been more widely supported or easier to achieve.