Playing with NSubstitute, a new mocking framework for .Net

Published on Sep 09, 2010

I heard about NSubstitute on episode 26 of Talking Shop down under.

It sounded like an interesting framework with some interesting ideas, so I took it for a spin.

A great (12 parts) comparison serie on mocking frameworks can be found on Richard Banks blog

Syntax

Lets see how we set an expectation for both NSubstitute and Rhino.Mocks

Rhino.Mocks has only one more line of code, but a long line at that. It’s part of the arrange where you set your expectation.
In NSubstitute you don’t need to do so and you are kind of setting that up in the verification or assert step of your code.

Let’s just stub and object and return some values.

Almost the same amount of code on both cases. Once again the main difference is the syntax and how the end result just reads like english with NSubstitute.

Let’s set things up to throw an exception.

Once again similar results. Actually I will argue that Rhino Mocks reads a bit better here.

A note of warning when using NSubstitute.

NSubstitute make use of extension methods on Object for it’s api, this cause some issues if you rely heavily on intellisense to write your code.

I have the same issues in some of my libraries, where I felt compelling to extend object. The problem is similar to what happens in javascript when you declare global variables/functions. You pollute the global context.

So for example I like to use SharpTestsEx to write nicer assertions. It also use extension methods but they are Type specific. In any case now written a simple assertion for equality in a string is a bit more tricky due to all the extension methods hanging from string and from the SharpTestEx extensions as well.

In any case I really think that I can learn to live with the noise due to how clean the test read and we all know that reading code is what we do 80% of the time.