Inversion of Control vs Dependency Injection

In short, IoC is a much broader term that includes, but is not limited to, DI

The term Inversion of Control (IoC) originally meant any sort of programming style where an overall framework or run-time controlled the program flow

Before DI had a name, people started to refer to frameworks that manage Dependencies as Inversion of Control Containers, and soon, the meaning of IoC gradually drifted towards that particular meaning: Inversion of Control over Dependencies.

Inversion of Control (IoC) means that objects do not create other objects on which they rely to do their work. Instead, they get the objects that they need from an outside source (for example, an xml configuration file).

Dependency Injection (DI) means that this is done without the object intervention, usually by a framework component that passes constructor parameters and set properties.

The Inversion-of-Control (IoC) pattern, is about providing any kind of callback (which "implements" and/or controls reaction), instead of acting ourselves directly (in other words, inversion and/or redirecting control to the external handler/controller).

For example, rather than having the application call the implementations provided by a library (also known as toolkit), a framework calls the implementations provided by the application.

The Dependency-Injection (DI) pattern is a more specific version of IoC pattern, where implementations are passed into an object through constructors/setters/service lookups, which the object will 'depend' on in order to behave correctly.

Every DI implementation can be considered IoC, but one should not call it IoC, because implementing Dependency-Injection is harder than callback (Don't lower your product's worth by using the general term "IoC" instead).

IoC without using DI, for example, would be the Template pattern because the implementation can only be changed through sub-classing.

DI frameworks are designed to make use of DI and can define interfaces (or Annotations in Java) to make it easy to pass in the implementations.

IoC containers are DI frameworks that can work outside of the programming language. In some you can configure which implementations to use in metadata files (e.g. XML) which are less invasive. With some you can do IoC that would normally be impossible like inject an implementation at pointcuts.

See also this Martin Fowler's article.