.NET Mocking Frameworks, a comparison

What is a Mocking Framework?

Mocking framework is used to create replacement objects like Fakes, Stubs and Mocks. It is used to isolate each dependency and help developers in performing unit testing in a concise, quick and reliable way.

Creating mock objects manually is difficult and time consuming so to increase your productivity you can go for automatic generating of mock objects by using a mocking framework. A developer can build his/her unit test by using any of one NUnit, MbUnit, MSTest, xUnit etc. unit test framework and can further test it on a mocking framework.

Here Comes Our List of Top 3 Mocking Frameworks for .Net Developers:

1) NSubstitute

NSubstitute is a free and open source mocking framework. NSubstitute creates friendly substitute for .Net mocking libraries. It is designed for Arrange-Act-Assert (AAA) testing. Source Code: https://github.com/nsubstitute/NSubstitute/ Testing Type: Arrange-Act-Assert (AAA)

2) Moq

This is a popular mocking framework for .Net. This mocking framework proves to be highly helpful when you are developing a Silverlight application. Moq is a simplest mocking library for .NET with a nice and simple API. It is a free and open source mocking framework. Source Code: https://github.com/moq/Moq/ Mock type: Supports mocking interfaces as well as classes.

3) FakeItEasy

FakeItEasy is an amazing and simple to use framework and is compatible with both C# and VB.Net. It provides nice options for fake and dummy creation and argument formatting. Also, it provides friendly API support. Source Code: https://github.com/FakeItEasy/FakeItEasy/