State of Rhino Mocks

Ayende Rahien (Oren Eini) recently posted about the state of Rhino Mocks. For those of you who don’t know, Rhino Mocks is a dynamic mock object framework for the .Net platform that Ayende created and developed which allows developers to “mock away concerns” in unit tests. I remember stumbling across Rhino Mocks around 2006 and ever since that time I have been hooked. I have tried other mocking frameworks but each time I have always returned to Rhino Mocks.

So it was shocking to read in his recent post that from his perspective, Rhino Mocks is done since he no longer has an interest in extending it and doesn’t really use mocking any longer. After reading that a few times (to make sure I was reading it correctly) he made a statement offering to have someone in the community step in and take it over.

What shocked me even further, however, were the comments of which nobody was offering to step in. How is this possible? Is the community really willing to let this code set simply fade away into history? Is unit testing and mocking so prevalent in the .Net community that we can scoff at the notion?

Losing Rhino Mocks, to me, has more to do with potentially losing the concepts and practices it promotes than simply the code and binaries. Having a framework that also promotes good practices is invaluable.

As a result… I did what I believe needed to be done.