Mocking Frameworks for .NET

The four major competitors in the free/open source .NET mocking framework arena are microsoft .netNMock/NMock2, NMock3, Rhino Mocks and MOQ. NMock and NMock2 were actually built by different teams, but they kept the same design philosophy and are backwards compatible so they can be used almost interchangeably. If you're familiar with NMock/NMock2, you'll see that NMock3 is from the same gene pool, but it starts fresh and has somewhat different syntax from its siblings. All of the major mocking libraries are mature products with a decent-sized user base, so it's not tough to find good examples and help for all of them but NMock3.

Like many other .NET developers, I started using NMock, and then "upgraded' to nMock2, but both use "magic strings" which can't take advantage of Intellisense, and make tests brittle because they're not easily amenable to refactoring without the use of additional tools like ReSharper to replace name-similar text in strings. On the plus side, NMock doesn't rely on the explicit record/replay statements as Rhino Mocks does. The NMock2 codebase hasn't been updated since late in 2009, and should not be expected to see continued development.

On the plus side, Rhino Mocks has a syntax that supports code refactoring and compile-time checking. Unfortunately, I don't find the syntax to be particularly intuitive, and the variety of ways to construct and condition mocks can lead to some confusion when different people are writing tests. There is also the annoying need to write explicit record and replay statements. Another problem with Rhino Mocks is that the project appears to be running out of steam. Aside from a few bug-fix patches, not much has happened since early in 2009.

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