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What is dependency injection, and why does it make a codebase easier to test and maintain? What is the 'captive dependency' problem, and how does the DI container help catch it? What are keyed services (introduced in .NET 8), and what problem do they solve compared to multiple unnamed registrations? How do you use IServiceScopeFactory to manually create and manage a DI scope outside the normal request pipeline? What is the Options pattern's relationship to DI, and how does IOptions<T> itself get resolved through the container? How would you unit test a service that depends on multiple injected interfaces without spinning up the full DI container?
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How does the DI container's disposal behavior work for IDisposable and IAsyncDisposable services across different lifetimes?

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Answer

The DI container automatically tracks and disposes any IDisposable/IAsyncDisposable service it created, calling Dispose/DisposeAsync when the owning scope ends (for Scoped/Transient services resolved within a request scope) or when the application shuts down (for Singleton services) -- notably, Transient services are still tracked and disposed by their containing scope, not immediately after use, which can cause unexpected memory retention if many short-lived Transient disposables accumulate within one long-lived scope.
public class ReportExporter : IDisposable {
    public void Dispose() => Console.WriteLine("Disposed");
}

builder.Services.AddTransient<ReportExporter>();
// Even though Transient, if resolved many times within one request scope,
// ALL instances are held and disposed together only when that request scope ends
Real-world example A memory profiling session reveals unexpectedly high memory retention within long request scopes traced to hundreds of Transient IDisposable service instances all being held alive until the scope's end rather than being freed immediately after each use.

Common follow-ups: Why doesn't the container dispose Transient services immediately after use?;How would you work around this for a Transient disposable used many times in a loop?

Memory Management & Garbage Collection;Diagnostics & Performance
All 16 Dependency Injection questions