Professional ASP.NET MVC 3

Understanding Software Design Patterns

To understand what dependency injection is and how you can apply it to MVC applications, we'll need to talk about software design patterns. A software design pattern is used to formalize the description of a problem and a solution to that problem, so that developers can use the pattern to simplify the identification and communication of common problems and solutions.

The design pattern isn't necessarily to claim the invention of something new or novel, but rather exists to give a formal name and definition from common practices in the industry. When you read about a design pattern, you may recognize it from solutions you've used in particular problems in the past.

Design Patterns

The concept of patterns and a pattern language is generally credited to Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein in their book A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, and Construction published in 1977. The book presents a view of architecture and urban planning in terms of patterns, which they used to describe problems (and solutions to those problems).

In the software development world, Kent Beck and Ward Cunningham were among the first to adopt the idea of a pattern language, and presented their experiment at the 1987 OOPSLA conference. Perhaps the first and best known comprehensive treatment on core software development patterns was the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, published in 1994. The book is often ...