[dependency-injection] Why does one use dependency injection?

As the other answers stated, dependency injection is a way to create your dependencies outside of the class that uses it. You inject them from the outside, and take control about their creation away from the inside of your class. This is also why dependency injection is a realization of the Inversion of control (IoC) principle.

IoC is the principle, where DI is the pattern. The reason that you might "need more than one logger" is never actually met, as far as my experience goes, but the actualy reason is, that you really need it, whenever you test something. An example:

My Feature:

When I look at an offer, I want to mark that I looked at it automatically, so that I don't forget to do so.

You might test this like this:

[Test]
public void ShouldUpdateTimeStamp
{
    // Arrange
    var formdata = { . . . }

    // System under Test
    var weasel = new OfferWeasel();

    // Act
    var offer = weasel.Create(formdata)

    // Assert
    offer.LastUpdated.Should().Be(new DateTime(2013,01,13,13,01,0,0));
}

So somewhere in the OfferWeasel, it builds you an offer Object like this:

public class OfferWeasel
{
    public Offer Create(Formdata formdata)
    {
        var offer = new Offer();
        offer.LastUpdated = DateTime.Now;
        return offer;
    }
}

The problem here is, that this test will most likely always fail, since the date that is being set will differ from the date being asserted, even if you just put DateTime.Now in the test code it might be off by a couple of milliseconds and will therefore always fail. A better solution now would be to create an interface for this, that allows you to control what time will be set:

public interface IGotTheTime
{
    DateTime Now {get;}
}

public class CannedTime : IGotTheTime
{
    public DateTime Now {get; set;}
}

public class ActualTime : IGotTheTime
{
    public DateTime Now {get { return DateTime.Now; }}
}

public class OfferWeasel
{
    private readonly IGotTheTime _time;

    public OfferWeasel(IGotTheTime time)
    {
        _time = time;
    }

    public Offer Create(Formdata formdata)
    {
        var offer = new Offer();
        offer.LastUpdated = _time.Now;
        return offer;
    }
}

The Interface is the abstraction. One is the REAL thing, and the other one allows you to fake some time where it is needed. The test can then be changed like this:

[Test]
public void ShouldUpdateTimeStamp
{
    // Arrange
    var date = new DateTime(2013, 01, 13, 13, 01, 0, 0);
    var formdata = { . . . }

    var time = new CannedTime { Now = date };

    // System under test
    var weasel= new OfferWeasel(time);

    // Act
    var offer = weasel.Create(formdata)

    // Assert
    offer.LastUpdated.Should().Be(date);
}

Like this, you applied the "inversion of control" principle, by injecting a dependency (getting the current time). The main reason to do this is for easier isolated unit testing, there are other ways of doing it. For example, an interface and a class here is unnecessary since in C# functions can be passed around as variables, so instead of an interface you could use a Func<DateTime> to achieve the same. Or, if you take a dynamic approach, you just pass any object that has the equivalent method (duck typing), and you don't need an interface at all.

You will hardly ever need more than one logger. Nonetheless, dependency injection is essential for statically typed code such as Java or C#.

And... It should also be noted that an object can only properly fulfill its purpose at runtime, if all its dependencies are available, so there is not much use in setting up property injection. In my opinion, all dependencies should be satisfied when the constructor is being called, so constructor-injection is the thing to go with.

I hope that helped.