moq VS AutoFixture

Moq’s prior version, 4.18.4, free of the exfiltration behavior, accounts for 6,765,006 downloads in the past six weeks, demonstrating the potential blast radius of privacy breach if a developer hadn’t noticed the issue and raised it with the community.

In light of the Moq issue yesterday[0] I'm interested to understand why the consensus seems to be so in favor of keeping packages up-to-date in software.

The common explanation I see is it "keeps you up to date with security and bug fixes".

But in practice this seems to just involve most orgs mandating Dependabot and mindlessly updating every dependency when a new version becomes available. (Yes in an ideal world you code review every change in every dependency, but... I mean, let's be real here. Just take the update frequency of the AWS SDK packages in isolation, very few orgs are actually doing this)

As a maintainer of an open source library I know most releases are a crapshoot, they're just as likely to contain new bugs and flaws as they are to fix old ones.

So staying up-to-date seems to open up codebases to far greater risks than outdated dependencies:

1) Zero days, a new package launches with some critical security flaw that isn't going to get noticed for some time.

2) Supply chain attacks, old packages are generally immutable. Therefore most supply chains attacks seem to involve take-overs of existing package (name)s by disgruntled or new hostile 'maintainers'. The new versions are far more at risk.

3) New bugs, the dirty truth of OSS is most work is done by unpaid people with little time or ability to focus. Most software isn't formally verified. New updates are a risk.

In addition the old version is a known quantity. Unless you know absolutely the version you are running is compromised (log4j, OpenSSL) what benefits does updating actually bring? The default presumption that version number goes up is better seems like yet more security/compliance cargo cult behavior.

What am I missing here?

[0] https://github.com/moq/moq/issues/1374

NSubstitute is good, I used it at a previous job.

I've favored Moq in the past because I think there are a couple of things it makes a bit easier or is a bit less opinionated about, but NSub is perfectly cromulent as well.

Someone posted a quick guide to migrating a bunch of it easily in one of the issues in the Moq repo discussing this whole mess: https://github.com/moq/moq/issues/1374#issuecomment-16712411...

Moq was is a popular .NET mocking library that has accumulated over 475.7 million downloads as of now.

Going by reports in the releated Github issue Moq does not let users opt out of this privacy-invading data collection: https://github.com/moq/moq/issues/1372

This is sad. Moq was my favorite mocking framework in .net. I will not be using it moving forward and if I had any projects using it I'd rip it out ASAP.

Yes, it does feel like some of the "standard stuff" in other more nuanced languages are missing (especially miss AutoFixture ngl). Some of those are a conscious decison by the golang team for example.

Our first test is very easy, I like to name my tests as MethodName_GivenCondition_ShouldExpectedResult to follow the pattern, I have added GetById_GivenRecordDoesNotExist_ShouldReturnNull and I am going to leavarage excellent AutoFixture to get a new Guid as parameter. For this test we don't need arrange part, we would skip to the act and then assert. For Assertion I am going to use FluentAssertions. For this test we need to assert the returned result is null.

The next test to talk about, is that if this was a bank, we would have multiple customers, who can hold multiple accounts that we need to calculate the interest for. You could manually construct these objects if you want, but I'm going to use a package called AutoFixture to make life easier.

AutoFixture is an amazing library that simplifies the process of creating test data in .NET. If for some reason you don't use this fantastic tool, it's time to consider it. Today, I'm going to share some tips for using AutoFixture that will be beneficial for developers of all skill levels. Let's get started!

AutoFixture

Ensuring that your test is still readable and not bloated by the setup of those variables may be quite a challenge but hopefully no more with AutoFixture, let's see how!

One neat library for creating and generating test data is AutoFixture.  The creators describe it as follows:

First time I heard of Bogus, looks interesting, been using AutoFixture for those will definitely take a look at it.