Definitely still an issue in C#. C# devs are just comfortable with the way it is because they don't know better and are held hostage. Everything in C# world after a certain size will involve IOC/DI and the entire ecosystem of frameworks that has co-evolved with it.
The issues are still there. You can't just "go to definition" of the class being injected into yours, even if there is only one. You get the Interface you expect (because hey you have to depend on Interfaces because of something something unit-testing), and then see what implements that interface. And no, it will not just point to your single implementation, it'll find the test implementation too.
But where that "thing" gets instantiated is still a mystery and depends on config-file configured life-cycles, the bootstrapping of your application, whether the dependency gets loaded from a DLL, etc. It's black-box elephants all the way to the start of your application. And all that you see at the start is something vague like: var myApp = MyDIFramework.getInstance(MyAppClass); Your constructors, and where they get called from is in a never-ending abyss of thick and unreadable framework code that is miles away from your actual app. Sacrificed at the alter of job-creation, unit-testing and evangelist's talk-resume padding.
Java is virtual by default. C# is not. You could mark every single method virtual and mock it like Java. But it’s easier to define a contract and mock that.
Yes, the comments about "$25 name for a 5c concept" ring true when you're looking at a toy example with constructor(logger) { .. }.
Then you look at an enterprise app with 10 years of history, with tests requiring 30 mocks, using a custom DI framework that only 2 people understand, with multiple versions of the same service, and it feels like you've entered another world where it's straight up impossible to debug code.
> You can't just "go to definition" of the class being injected into yours, even if there is only one.
This situation isn't unique when using DI (although admittedly DI does make using interfaces more common). However, that's what the "go to implementation" menu option is for.
For a console app, you're right that a DI framework adds a lot of complexity. But for a web app, you've already got all that framework code managing controller construction. If you've got the black box anyways, might as well embrace it.
Make those dependency interfaces dynamic enough to be practically untyped, introduce arbitrary implicit ordering requirements, and we have now invented Middleware.
I haven't really done any c# for 5+ years. What has changed?
I remember trying to effectively reverse-engineer a codebase (code available but nobody knew how it worked) with a lot of DI and it was fairly painful.
Maybe it was possible back then and I just didn't know how ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If the rules of the dependency injection framework are well understood, the IDE can build a model in the background and make it navigable. I can't speak for C#, but Spring is navigable in IntelliJ. It will tell you which implementation is used, or if one is missing.
In a Spring application there are a lot of (effective) singletons, the "which implementation of the variable that implements Foo is it" becomes also less of a question.
In any case, we use Spring on a daily basis, and what you describe is not a real issue for us.
Also, what I think is also important to differentiate between: dependency injection, and programming against interfaces.
Interfaces are good, and there was a while where infant DI and mocking frameworks didn't work without them, so that folks created an interface for every class and only ever used the interface in the dependent classes. But the need for interfaces has been heavily misunderstood and overstated. Most dependencies can just be classes, and that means you can in fact click right into the implementation, not because the IDE understands DI, but because it understands the language (Java).
Don't hate DI for the gotten-out-of-control "programming against interfaces".
In every language/IDE I've ever used ctrl-click would take you to the interface definition, then you have a second "Show implementations" step that lists the implementations (which is usually really slow) and finally you can have to select the right implementation from the list.
It's technically a flaw of using generic interfaces, rather than DI. But the latter basically always implies the former.
I’m not sure why you’re being down voted despite being correct.
If there are multiple implementations it gives a list to navigate to. If there’s 1 it goes straight to it. Don’t know about IntelliJ but rider and vs do this. And if the solution is indexed this is fast.
Why, as a professional, would you not use professional tooling. Not just for DI, but there are many benefits to using an IDE. If you want to hone your skills in your own time by using a text editor, why not. But as a professional, denying the use of an IDE is a disservice to your team. (But hey, everyone's entitled their opinion!)
Edit: upon rereading I realize your point was about reading code, not writing it, so I guess that could be a different use case...
Being able to understand a system under fire with minimal tooling available is a property one must design for. If you get woken up at 3am with a production outage, the last thing you want to do is start digging through some smart-ass framework's idea of what is even running to figure out where the bug is.
There's nothing wrong with using an IDE most of the time, but building dependence on one such that you can't do anything without it is absolute folly.
