So while going through my blogs I came across one about a new mocking framework specifically designed for unit testing within SharePoint. The blog can be found here and from their website they have several demos of using Isolator for SharePoint mocking.
I'm interested in having more of a play with it, and Typemock are offering a free license for so:
Typemock are offering their new product for unit testing SharePoint called Isolator For SharePoint, for a special introduction price. it is the only tool that allows you to unit test SharePoint without a SharePoint server. To learn more click here.The first 50 bloggers who blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Full Isolator license, Free. for rules and info click here.
But I do wonder about the overall benefit of Isolator. Without playing with it I can't make any conclusions but I've always found mocking can be a dicy subject, particularly if you're mocking something which can have an impact on the underlying operation of the code
And that is a concern about mocking the SharePoint API.
I'm am a fan of RhinoMocks and have played with it and found it really useful when I was stubbing up interfaces, but I never took it to the level of mocking up full API-level components (although I really do want to get around to trying it to get around some of the limits of the Umbraco API!).
I'll try and do some more investigation on Typemock's Isolator for SharePoint and see what I can find. If it really does what they say it does it could make it easier to develop SharePoint API-prototypes without the need for a SharePoint environment.