Session Abstract:

Unit testing has become an accepted part of our lives as .NET programmers. To help focus our tests to only the code we want to validate, Mocking Frameworks are a powerful tool in our toolbox. Like many tools, if you have an understanding of how the tool works under the hood, you can bend it to your will (and also know where it'll break if you bend too much).

In this session, you'll learn about the two main types of mocking frameworks: constrained frameworks (like RhinoMocks and Moq) and unconstrained frameworks (such as Typemock Isolator and Telerik JustMock). I'll dig into how the two actually do their magic and we'll discuss the pros, cons, and limits of both. We'll look at examples of how to use the frameworks in your tests, mocking out dependencies from your own code and even third-party logic.

You'll get the most out of this session if you're comfortable reading C# code and have a general understanding of class inheritance in .NET, along with some experience writing and running unit tests. Prior experience using mocking frameworks is not necessary.

Related Pages:

Recommended Reading:

The Art of Unit Testing Roy Osherove

I'm a huge fan of unit testing and have found Test Driven Development to be my preferred development style. In this book, Osherove walks through the fundamentals of automated testing, including unit testing and mocking frameworks, common terminology, patterns and approaches to writing meaningful and maintainable tests. I read this book with my team and it help set a common understanding and vocabulary for how we approach automated testing.