A few weeks ago Oren (known to many as Ayende Rahien) pushed out a Rhino.Mocks beta drop so we could take a look at the new Arrange/Act/Assert syntax being cooked up for the pending 3.5 release. Yesterday I finally upgraded my client project to the 3.5 beta bits and started digging into the new syntax. AAA, FTW! After using Arrange/Act/Assert for just a day or two I’m already hooked. It feels like a much more natural fit for bdd-style tests. The whole Given, Expect, When, Then, go-back-and-verify-expectations flow always felt clumsy and counterintuitive, and AAA allows for...

At last week's CONDG meeting I gave a lightning talk on Rhino.Mocks. Overall I think the talk went pretty well - the talk was voted second best of the night, following Jon Kruger's talk on LINQ to SQL. But that's OK with me. I knew a topic like mocking would be a hard one to cover in just 15 minutes. My goal was just to get people interested so they would go out and investigate some more on their own. And judging by the questions I got during the one minute Q&A at the end of my talk and the conversations I...

At next week's CONDG meeting I'll be giving a Lightning Talk on my favorite .net mocking framework, Rhino.Mocks. As I sat down to start planning my talk I realized I had a little problem - how do I cover such an extensive and powerful tool in just 15 minutes? The answer: I don't Even if I spewed out words at a rate comparable with a world-class auctioneer I still couldn't cover everything I wanted to. Off the top of my head... Mock vs. DynamicMock vs. PartialMock vs. Stub what's...

Last week I talked about Rubifying your C# code by adding the .Each() extension method to the IEnumerable<T> interface. I was discussing that code with one of the guys at work and he asked a brilliant question So, how did you test that? I was floored. Being such a test-first fan boy I couldn’t believe that I had failed to write that little extension method in a TDD manner. Hell, I hadn’t even done TAD! So how do I test it? There are no doubt a plethora of ways to test this...

Your Resolution this year should be: If you aren’t sure, make it public... and make everything virtual (or overridable, depending on your language) by default. Of course this primarily applies to those folks building frameworks for statically typed languages... <cough> Microsoft <cough>, but it also holds weight for the rest of us. After all, we all want other people to use our code - even if other people is your customers, your team, or yourself. The point is, we want our code to be (re)used. And I don’t know about you, but I’d...