coverlet VS NSubstitute

You might have noticed when you were looking in NuGet, there was a package called coverlet installed into the project:

There are a lot libraries to collect code coverage, one of this one is Coverlet: https://github.com/coverlet-coverage/coverlet

We use Coverlet. You have to do some work to get it working with your tests but I have no complaints. I don't know for sure if it works with VS Community, but since it plugs into MSBuild I'm not sure how it could be gated to that.

And I would like to build a total test coverage for the solution. So, I added coverlet.msbuild to the dependencies and executed the next command from the examples of coverlet

CoverletOutputFormat: The format of the report that coverlet will generate (opencover, cobertura, json). More here;

Utilize Coverletand Report Generator utilities – however, this is where its funny, because these are .NET CLI tools that need the .NET 6 SDK installed.

Coverlet works really well.

However, I am hesitant to do so. Whenever it seems I have to fight the tools that are provided for me this is a likely sign that I’m Doing Things Wrong because of some fundamental misunderstandings and misassumptions on my part. I did some digging and found that VSTest by design forces the placement of data collectors’ output into GUIDed subdirectories, see Coverlet documentation, Coverlet issue #500 and VSTest issue #2378. That this is forced by design reinforces my worries that I’m doing something counterproductive.

Coverlet

a. you might do so purely out of argo cult, i.e. because someone told you this was the right thing to do™, and that's a silly exercise. b. you could also be doing this for a good reason: to use the interface with a mocking tool like NSubstitute

When comparing it to one of its most well-known alternatives, NSubstitute, which has "only" reached 85.6 million downloads, it is fair to say that Moq is the most widely used mocking library in the .NET ecosystem.

Maintainer rejected the PR. They have temporarily disabled the integration in https://github.com/moq/moq/pull/1375 but kept the SponsorLink project reference in the source code. It seems like their intent is to re-enable the integration at a later point :(

NSubstitute [0] might be an alternative. Or to fork Moq pre-4.20.

[0] https://nsubstitute.github.io/

In terms of mocking there are several frameworks you can use, but I've mainly relied on Moq and NSubstitute. Within this demo, I'm going to use NSubstitute as I've found it a little easier to use.

it will change the URL from https://github.com/nsubstitute/NSubstitute to https://github.dev/nsubstitute/NSubstitute (or you can just nav there yourself).

NSubstitute

🔗 NSubstitute documentation | NSubstitute

If you use NSubstitute (the best mocking .NET framework), then you have to install this small yet useful plugin right now. It kindly generates mocks and Arg.Is / Arg.Any.

Another nice mocking framework is NSubstitute https://nsubstitute.github.io/