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0 votes
Suggestion: Build a replacement for Microsoft Pex, fully integrated with the awesome Isolator framework.

We've been playing with Microsoft Pex automated unit test framework, and have been really blown away by the possibilities. It answers 2 things about your code:

1. Will my code crash? And if so, what method arguments will make it crash?
2. Does my code work as expected?

For #1, there is little-to-no developer effort - just run Pex, and it tells you where your code crashes and with what parameters, and optionally, generates unit tests to cover these cases.

For #2, you provide a parameterized unit test that describes the desired behavior, and Pex checks that behavior will hold under all parameters passed to it, in all states of the class under test.

This proves hugely useful for us: we can say whether a piece of code can crash, and also whether it is behaving properly, and Pex figures out all the parameters to make that happen.

However, Pex starts falling apart when used in the real world where you have dependencies, file system access, network and database access, etc. There, Pex provides a rather awkward "mock" framework/code generator called Moles. It sucks, and Isolator blows this away.

Enter TypeMock Isolator. You guys are a perfect fit for this. Build a piece of software that analyzes my code and tells me where it crashes, and with what inputs it crashes. Let me write a parameterized unit test that describes the desired behavior, and have your software tell me if it will behave as expected. Integrate this with Isolator to fake the dependencies. Life will be grand, and you'll have my dollars.

What do you think?
asked by JudahGabriel (1.3k points)

3 Answers

0 votes
Judah,

Thanks for the suggestions! It's really great thrilling to us to see what you guys think about where the product should develop to. As for making life grand - would an Isolator version that works inside Pex help you out there? Or were you thinking of a larger scale solution?

Thanks!
Doron
Typemock Support
answered by doron (17.2k points)
0 votes
I don't think reinventing the Pex functionality would be the way to go. Pex with Isolator mocks would be an awesome feature and it would make both products better. The moles framework for mocks works for simple things, but if I could provide an Isolator fake to Pex -- that would be awesome.

Of course Pex is still under heavy development. So things on that end are still in great flux which makes TypeMock's job of integrating with Pex much more speculative I'm sure.
answered by ksummerlin (4k points)
0 votes
Yes, Pex working with Isolator (being able to mock dependencies inside Pex parameterized unit test) would be acceptable.

Not as good as an all-in-one integrated solution - having to deal with versioning issues between Pex and Isolator would be an occasional pain, and having them play nice together is something we'd probably have to suffer through, but it's workable.

If you can make Isolator work inside Pex parameterized unit tests, this would be a huge feature for us.
answered by JudahGabriel (1.3k points)
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