Getting a rare chance to do some serious refactoring and have committed to doing it “right” with TDD. To that end I’ve been introduced to my new friend Moq [1]—a lazy-evaluating object mocking framework.
Abstract your objects to interfaces and then create a new Mock object with the interface as its type… and Bob’s your uncle! From here you can stub out your interface object to return whatever values are useful for you when contriving unit tests. All the not-useful stuff? Just let it go since lazy evaluation means the mocked object won’t give a damn so long as you don’t invoke them.
The amount of time saved going this route? ALL OF THE TIMES! Enough I can skip out briefly to tell you all about this goodness and still have developed an OptionsManager framework that is fully covered by unit tests.
See, I do love my job sometimes.
