[...] I played with some mocking frameworks in .Net. There are already some comparisons available (here, here or here). In this blog post I want to show which frameworks are available and which one fits best [...]

[...] Moq and some are commercial such as TypeMock . Here are two links that compare few of them http://www.phpvs.net/2009/04/25/net-mocking-frameworks-capability-comparison/ and http://codevanced.net/post/Mocking-frameworks-comparison.aspx [...]

[...] a bit of research I decided on using Rhino Mocks. The decision was primarily made from examining this comparison and my past experiences with Ayende. I have previously used Fluent NHibernate from Ayende, and was [...]

Thanks Gil. I hadn't seen A.K.'s project but I'm glad you posted it. Looks extremely useful.

I'll update the chart.

Great work on the comparison. By the way did you see Andrew Kazyryevitch comparison? (http://code.google.com/p/mocking-frameworks-compare/)?

Just to update your table, we support callbacks now. And if you'e like to see the comparison we did, email me at Gilz at typemock dot com.

Thanks.

Gil Zilberfeld
Typemock.

[...] .Net Mocking Frameworks – Capability Comparison A nice comparison of popular .NET mocking frameworks. Good information to have. [...]

Thanks for the reply. I marked the event support as partial because all I could find on events with NMock2 was some posts that showed workarounds for raising events. Same with callbacks. It might have been NMock I was looking at. Of course now that you point it out, I found in the documentation how to do it, so looks like no problems there. I'll update the chart asap.

When you say NMock2 now supports mocking classes, do you mean non-virtual members of a class as well?

Documentation was something I considered adding, but it's a little subjective. I think lots of people feel that Rhino is well documented, where I (being a relative noob) don't agree with that Understandability of error messages may be something I add to the chart though, as this is often brought up as a failure of Rhino, which seems like a valid criticism.

Some additions to NMock2:
- "confusing product version": sad but true, we continue to develop NMock2 (with the 2 in the name). NMock2 is based on NMock version 2 (2 in the version number). Unfortunately, we cannot convince the "old" NMock team to link their pages to our version. The current version can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/nmock2.

- support for events: you mark it as partial support. What do you miss?

- class mocks: this is a new feature of our current release candidate, only.

- "callback on mocked method": this is support with actions (e.g. DelegateAction) in NMock2.

- "magic strings": it is true that that makes refactoring a bit more complex. However with the right toolset (e.g. ReSharper) we don't have problems with that. And from a pure TDD point of view, you should change your unit test first
these magic strings have advantages and disadvantages: the disadvantage is clear, no compile time check, no intellisense support; the advantage is the flexibility we get: our syntax is not limited to what you can express in C#, what results in the easiest syntax to read (compared to the other frameworks). And if you do TDD then you read your unit tests more often than you write them.

Other things to compare:
- documentation, although we are very bad regarding this
- understandability of error messages: here we are very good, I think
- performance: not crucial but important, too

But, as long as developers do use a mocking framework (which ever) it's a good sign

Happy mocking
Urs