What is a service provider?
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but I'm a C developer just meeting a bunch of .NET guys and overheard them talking.
They sketched the design and talked constantly about the service provider, services and spring. Instead of looking silly asking them, I just decided to post here.
BTW, I'm in the business of developing device drivers (for over 10 years using C) and have NEVER heard of a service provider.
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If it was mentioned in the context of Spring, then most likely they were talking about the Service Locator Pattern .
A service locator is a concept in dependency injection frameworks; it is a "core" that you can use to get arbitrary types of abstract services. Usually with some code:
IMyService myService = locator.GetService<IMyService>();
In other words, it provides a special interface for components to access an abstract service - usually an interface type - without knowing anything about the particular type or how it was created.
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