In the last month or two, I have been hand coding a lot of mock and stub objects and it has become a nightmare to manage. My primary reason for doing this by hand was that Rhino Mocks 3.4 and older did not fit with the BDD style unit tests that I was writing. Yes, I made it work in a few places, but it was ugly and annoying.

Fortunately, Ayende has cleaned it all up with the new syntax and made it very easy to assert that individual expectations were met, with v3.5. I finally got around to trying out the new syntax today, and I immediately fell in love with it. For example:

[Concern("User Administration")]

public class When_accessing_the_system_as_a_non_administrator : ContextSpecification

{

    private IMainView view;

    private IMainView GetView()

    {

        IMainView mockView = MockRepository.GenerateMock<IMainView>();

        mockView.Expect(v => v.EnableUserManagement()).Repeat.Never();

        mockView.Expect(v => v.DisableUserManagement()).Repeat.Once();

        return mockView;

    }

    protected override void Context()

    {

        User administrator = new User();

        administrator.IsAdministrator = false;

        CurrentUser.User = administrator;

        view = GetView();

        new MainPresenter(view);

    }

    [Observation]

    public void Should_not_display_the_User_Management_option()

    {

        view.AssertWasNotCalled(v => v.EnableUserManagement());

    }

    [Observation]

    public void Should_hide_the_user_management_option()

    {

        view.AssertWasCalled(v => v.DisableUserManagement());

    }

}

In the "GetView" method, I am setting up two very distinct expectations on my mock object.

1. Never Call the EnableUserManagement method.
2. Call the DisableUserManagement method once.

With the new Rhino Mocks syntax, I can easily verify that each one of these expectations was called via my "should" observations.

The "AssertWasNotCalled" extension method verifies that an expectation of Repeat.Never was setup and that the method was not called.

mockView.AssertWasNotCalled(v => v.EnableUserManagement());

And the "AssertWasCalled" extension method verifies that the expectation was to call the method, and that the method actually was called.

mockView.AssertWasCalled(v => v.DisableUserManagement());

I like it. The new syntax has really simplified my Context Specification testing.