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Mock Frameworks vs. Microsoft Fakes | Sauce Labs
There are alternatives to it, sure. But the product from the Redmond giant is the go-to when it comes to developing for the. NET framework. Download a free trial of NDepend and check out all of the architecture visualization you can get without needing to upgrade your VS edition. To understand the differences between the professional and enterprise editions of Visual Studio, you must first keep in mind that Microsoft offers the IDE in a tiered fashion.
Visual Studio Enterprise has a particular focus on software architects so this edition obviously has several features related to software architecture.
You could integrate said validation in your build process, for instance. In the latest version, this feature was also improved to offer live dependency validation. Code duplication is one of the worst problems in a code base. Visual Studio Enterprise can help developers and architects out there deal with this problem with a convenient feature: code clones analysis. With this feature, Visual Studio can localize possible code duplicates so that you can eliminate them. Developers spend a considerable amount of time in the debugger.
The first feature here is IntelliTrace. Instead of the traditional, present-time debugging, IntelliTrace allows you to debug a past execution of your app. You can save IntelliTrace data from a lot of different sources, including a deployed app in the production! This feature offers a new type of experience when debugging by allowing you to visualize the current method—and also the previous methods called—as diagrams that integrate with the debugger and update in real time as you step through your code.
Finally, we get to. This feature allows you to analyze memory dump files to identify and fix performance problems, such as memory leaks or unnecessary allocations. This feature supports the NUnit, xUnit. Visual Studio Enterprise offers you this metric natively. A good unit test should be kept as separate and independent as possible, not only from other tests but also from infrastructure concerns.
Visual Studio Enterprise tries to solve that problem with Microsoft Fakes. Microsoft Fakes allows you to use stubs and shims to simulate external dependencies in your code. A classical use case for that would be to simulate a specific date to test for a time-sensitive bug.
Visual Studio Enterprise can go beyond even that. Visual Studio Enterprise can cater to those needs as well. With coded UI testing , you can create automated tests that drive the application through its user interface. After the test is recorded, you can specify values for parameters and fine-tune it using a special editor. A code base should not live on automated tests alone though. Manual tests are still a vital part of a comprehensive quality strategy, and Visual Studio Enterprise can cater to those needs as well.
And the primary tool used to do that is the Microsoft Test Manager, which is a comprehensive solution that allows its user to complete the following tasks :. Think of it as a centralized control panel on all things test-related. Microsoft offers Visual Studio under a tiered offerings model. So, analyzing the differences between Visual Studio Professional and Visual Studio Enterprise respectively the second and third tiers amounts to covering the characteristics present in the latter but absent in the former.
For software architects though, Visual Studio Enterprise might make sense, as long as you have plenty of budget. Carlos Schults is a. You can read more from Carlos at carlosschults. Measure quality with metrics, generate diagrams and enforce decisions with code rules, right in Visual Studio. Download the NDepend Trial and understand your. NET code base technical-debt within a few minutes.
NDepend Improve your. NET code quality with NDepend. Instead, it comes in several shapes and sizes. Which one should you pick? What are the features that matter for your use case? Wishing your edition of Visual Studio had full architecture tooling support?
Carlos Schults. Contributing Author. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Make your. NET code beautiful with NDepend Measure quality with metrics, generate diagrams and enforce decisions with code rules, right in Visual Studio.
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replace.me › add-microsoft-fakes-unit-test-isola. Microsoft Fakes should also be available in the Community edition because Visual Studio Enterprise is not an option for example for Open Source projects.
Visual Studio Enterprise vs. Professional: Essential Differences
Running unit tests after every build is supported only in Visual Studio Enterprise. Running unit tests after every build is supported in Visual Studio Enterprise. Visual Studio Enterprise can do this automatically with Live Unit Testing which detects tests affected by your. If you have Visual Studio Enterprise Microsoft Fakes can be used with test methods that you write by using unit test frameworks for managed code.
Visual Studio Enterprise enables you to easily tailor your tool chain. Visual Studio Enterprise. If the target resource is not fully interface-compliant, you must use a shim, rather than a mock or stub. The first and perhaps most obvious feature that makes MS Fakes stand out is that it is fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio.
This means that you can do such things as automatically generate stub classes for every interface in an assembly simply by selecting “Add Fakes Assembly” from the context menu for a reference to that assembly. Visual Studio recognizes stub classes and treats them as such. In debugging, for example, it ignores the generated code forming the stub structure and looks strictly at the programmer-created code that the stub contains.
The process of generating and using shims is integrated into Visual Studio in a similar manner. The second and somewhat controversial distinctive feature of Microsoft Fakes is that it generates stubs and shims, but not full mocks.
This does not mean that you cannot provide a stub with the kind of features found in mock frameworks such as Moq, but it does mean that you have to specifically add them and take care of any housekeeping by hand. Depending on the kind of tests that you are doing and the level of complexity of the tests, this can result in a significant amount of programming overhead.
The third and also controversial feature of Microsoft Fakes is its use of shims. Shims are necessary if you want to incorporate any non-interface-compliant interactions, of course, but to some critics of their use, that is exactly the problem. Code that bypasses interfaces, they say, is sloppy code, and more to the point, it greatly increases the probability that at some point in the future, it will lead to broken dependencies.
Making it easy to generate shims for testing, they fear, will simply encourage bad programming habits. Defenders of shim-based testing, however, point out that non-interface interactions are sometimes unavoidable, particularly when dealing with external applications that do not provide an API. Microsoft’s own recommendations regarding stubs and shims take these considerations into account.
Their basic recommendation is that dependencies which you create as part of your codebase should be fully interface-compliant, and that you use stubs in place of those dependencies during testing. Shims should be used where stubs cannot be used – with external resources that include static, non-virtual, private or sealed methods, or which otherwise do not include an API that can be used for testing with stubs. Microsoft’s documentation brings up another consideration regarding shims: They work by creating detours from the real method being called to the shim’s method in your application code.
Since both the creation and deletion of detours occurs during run-time, it can slow down test execution. There is no equivalent delay with stubs. So, which is best for you – a third-party mock framework, or Microsoft Fakes? In many ways, that depends on what kind of testing you intend to do. If you want in-depth testing of complex dependency interactions, a third-party framework with full mocking features might be more suitable.
For software architects though, Visual Studio Enterprise might make sense, as long as you have plenty of budget. Carlos Schults is a. You can read more from Carlos at carlosschults.
Measure quality with metrics, generate diagrams and enforce decisions with code rules, right in Visual Studio.
Download the NDepend Trial and understand your. NET code base technical-debt within a few minutes. NDepend Improve your. NET code quality with NDepend. Instead, it comes in several shapes and sizes.
Which one should you pick? What are the features that matter for your use case? Wishing your edition of Visual Studio had full architecture tooling support? Carlos Schults. Contributing Author. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Make your. NET code beautiful with NDepend Measure quality with metrics, generate diagrams and enforce decisions with code rules, right in Visual Studio.