Skip to main content

Whatever Happened to Pong ... err ... SharpMock?

Just short of four years ago, I came up with an idea for replacing static/sealed methods in legacy code (the Michael Feathers kind) with fakes for testing purposes. Here's a quick rundown of what happened after I had that idea:

  1. Messed my brain up trying, for several hours over the course of many days, to figure out how to bend PostSharp to my will
  2. Left it alone for months
  3. Came back to it and spent several hours re-learning what I needed to know
  4. Left it alone for months
  5. Came back to it again and spent several hours re-learning what I needed to know
  6. Left it alone for months
  7. Came back to it and decided to try using LinFu as the AOP framework driving things
  8. Had what seemed like a pretty decent prototype working based on a dozen or so unit tests that fell apart under a little more weight
  9. Gave up on LinFu and left it alone for a few months
  10. Started over using Microsoft CCI Code Model to create my own specialized AOP framework to drive the mocking framework
  11. Made minor advances
  12. Left it alone for months
  13. Made minor advances
  14. Left it alone for months
  15. Paddle the paddle to the side to the side, To the side to the side to the paddle the paddle
  16. ...
  17. Finally started getting a bit more serious, found a decent development workflow, and started banging out some features

So that's where things stand now - there's repo over on GitHub with some really horrendous code in it that passes a handful of tests while being pretty much unusable in real-world scenarios.

For the most part I'm having fun with it and just trying to get it into a somewhat stable state. (I'd like to say it's always fun, but it's actually not, probably because I'm doing something wrong. I'll try to explore that in a later post.) Once I get the 'basic' features implemented, along with one or two other critical usability pieces, I'll starting publicizing it in an attempt to get people to use it. A main test for me is getting it to work on a few libraries in the codebase at my current job - and even for the implemented features, it does not.

But I Need to Fake Static Methods!

You have plenty of options:

  • Functionally, far and away the best option is TypeMock
  • TypeMock has a competitor
  • I'm pretty sure support for this free alternative will be baked into VS 2012
  • Pretty soon all the cool kids will be doing this; at that point in time, I'll hang my head in dismay for having spent too much time ponging around
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Migrating Hg Repos with hg-fast-export and Windows Subsystem for Linux

Introduction I prefer Mercurial (hg) to git . I don’t really have any reason for this preference - they both do the same thing, and the user experience for 90% of the use cases is the same. It probably comes from the conditions of the DVCS landscape when I started using these systems. Some of this may have been perception only, but it looked like this: GitHub didn’t have free private repos BitBucket did have free private repos BitBucket was very hg-friendly Joel Spolsky had an amazing tutorial that served as both a how-to for hg as well as a general intro to DVCS hg was much more Windows-friendly than git Since hg was written in python, I felt like extending it would be easier than doing so for git if I ever needed to (admittedly, this is a pretty ridiculous reason) hg felt like a more unified, “coherent” system than the very linux-y feeling git and its extensions (also pretty ridiculous) Where they differed, I liked the verbs hg used better than git’s counterparts ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Enabling Globalization Invariant Mode for .NET Core App on Raspberry Pi Running LibreElec

I had an app I wanted to run on my Raspberry Pi 3 running LibreElec . In LibreElec you can install the dotnet core 2.2 runtime as an addon, and in Visual Studio you can compile for ARM processors with ‘Target Runtime’ set to ‘linux-arm’ in the publish profile. So, I published to a folder from VS using that profile, and I copied the output over to my RPi which had the dotnet runtime installed. I did a simple dotnet Whatever.dll to run the app (actually in this case, it was /storage/.kodi/addons/tools.dotnet-runtime/bin/dotnet Whatever.dll because of the way the addon is installed) and was met with this error: FailFast: Couldn't find a valid ICU package installed on the system. Set the configuration flag System.Globalization.Invariant to true if you want to run with no globalization support. at System.Environment.FailFast(System.String) at System.Globalization.GlobalizationMode.GetGlobalizationInvariantMode() at System.Globalization.GlobalizationMode..cctor() at Syste...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stubbing Static Methods with PostSharp

TypeMock uses the Profiler API to allow mocking, stubbing, etc. of classes used by code under test. It has the ability to handle sealed classes, static classes, non-virtual methods, and other troublesome-yet-oft-encountered scenarios in the world of unit testing. Other frameworks rely on proxies to intercept method calls, limiting them to be able to only fake virtual, abstract, and interface members. They also rely on dependecy injection to place the proxies as the concrete implementation of calls to the abstracted interface members. Anyone working with a legacy codebase is bound to run into static method calls (especially in the data access layer), dependencies on concrete types with non-virtual methods, and sealed class dependencies (HttpContext anyone?). The only way to unit test this without refactoring is with TypeMock. I've never used TypeMock, and I'm sure it's a great product, but it's not free. I decided to spike some code to see if I could solve the prob...
6 comments
Read more