Technical Preview – Typemock Isolator with “Typhoon”

it’s been quiet here for a while, so we’ve decided to show you what we’ve been working on.

This installer contains the two next productivity features of Isolator: InteliTest and Testomatic. They are intended to make tests even easier than you can get with Isolator today.

InteliTest is a code-completion tool, which creates the Isolate.Fake.Instance statements for you. It’s very simple and you’re bound to hit it when you open a parenthesis. It’s more impressing when you do a Swap.NextInstance and then it completes the fake definition for you.

Testomatic is a code generation tool in a  test wizard style. You start off with an integration test. You right-click on the Testomatic context menu, and the wizard begins. It runs your test until it hits a NullRefernceException. It then offers a suggestion to fake what caused that exception( this is called a decision point, the user needs to decide what to do next). Even better, it shows you the stack of calls, with their code preview. You can decide where to return a fake value on each method of the stack. Once you pick the suggestion, it adds the correct code, builds the test and runs it again. If it hits a method that returns a value type (or a string) on a fake, it asks what to return. It continues the code-build-run cycle until the tests completes.

It’s quite cool, seeing it works. And now you can try it out for yourselves. You’re the first to see it outside this office, and we like to get as much feedback as we can, before moving on. So hit us with bugs, features, ideas. We’re open for business.

You can download it from here. Here are the limitations so far:

• Requires DXCore latest version. You can download it from here.
• Works with MSTest only.
• Works for public statics and future objects (objects created inside the production code). Does not for objects created inside the test context.
• Cannot set a decision for non-public and generic methods.
• Does not support TestInitialize – decision points not raised from calls inside Initialize
• If we get a decision point with a stack that has a method we cannot inject on because we haven't faked something up the stack, we still offer the advice and if the user selects it we inject code for the top method in the stack.
• If the test project has been changed (added reference, for instance), and not saved before running Testomatic, we offer to save the csproj. If the user cancels, VS may crash.
• We suggest decision points we cannot support, such as faking System.Object as a recursive fake. We should not offer decisions on stuff we can't support – mscorlib, lambdas, etc
• We have a problem intercepting recursive fake returns on future (Swap.All) instances

Go ahead and try it. And give us feedback. We love feedback.