After Mini Spa this year I was fortunate enough to get to chat to Nat Pryce in the bar. He mentioned some interesting projects he’s working on, such as something I think he called “Domainatrix” – a tool you can use to analyse your code to see if it is relevant to the domain. Very nice chap.
Having used NMock (which he helped write) extensively I asked him if anyone was looking after it as there hasn’t been any visible activity for a while. It turns out that Thoughtworks took it over as of release 2.0 but have clearly decided not to support it anymore.
If you’re still using it I highly recommend you start looking for a new mocking tool ASAP.
I’ve recently started using RhinoMocks instead of nMock, mainly because it’s strongly-typed. However, I’ve found a few other little treats:
Stubs
In nMock, if you want to stub some method calls on a mocked interface you have to do something like this:
Mockery mockery = new Mockery();
IService mockService = mockery.NewMock();
Stub.On(mockService).Method("MethodA");
Stub.On(mockService).Method("MethodB");
Stub.On(mockService).Method("MethodC");
...
Which is cumbersome and noisy. In RhinoMocks you can do this:
MockRepository Repository repository = new MockRepository();
IService serviceMock = repository.Stub();
...
…and RhinoMocks will ignore all calls to that interface. This is really nice as you generally only test the SUT’s interaction with one dependency at a time.
Dynamic Mocks
If you only want to test one interaction with a dependency and ignore all others you can create a dynamic mock.
MockRepository Repository repository = new MockRepository();
repository .DynamicMock();
...All calls to the mocked dependency will be ignored unless they are explicitly expected (e.g. Expect.Call(mockService.MethodA)…..). This is the same as not saying mockery.VerifyAllExpectationsHaveBeenMet() in nMock. It’s always annoyed me that you have to remember to do this in nMock and I much prefer that the default for RhinoMocks is to fail when encountering an unexpected method call.
Raising Events
nMock does not natively support raising events, which is a pain, but there are ways around it (I’ve extended his example to support custom EventArgs which you can download here). With RhinoMocks it’s much simpler. Rather than explaining it myself, check out J-P Boodhoo’s great example here.
