Page fault accessing Mocks

I realised how little I know about mocking, stubbing et. al. as soon as I read the quickstart for moq. Main problem was the domain language.

Expect? What the hell.. Does mock expect anything? Or do we expect something from mock? Perhaps I can gain some more insight by reading about other mocking frameworks...

Clicking a link about Rhino showed me some more code, and a clearer mental image started to form. Still, gained a faint image of the meaning of Expect, but had two more keywords I know nothing about: ReplayAll and VerifyAll.

Previously I had encountered and used the concept of a mock when dealing with tests and database connections. Not wanting to setup a whole database with test data just to make sure a method's implemented correctly, I ended up writing custom mocks which implement an in-memory version of the database, returning test values when certain methods are called. Useful? yes. Practical? no, not really. Different tests had different needs, and the choice became to either implement different mocks, or to have one mock support a bunch of tests. Not the most efficient way to do it, as it is now a bit clearer.

So, here's to a cup of juice, feet up and some light reading! I feel it is just the beginning...