The main features of this release are partial mocks and method swizzling. Sometimes it’s just easier to use a real object rather than setting up a complex mock from scratch, but often in such cases there is at least one method on the real object that has undesirable side effects, or a method returning a value that we would like to change for a test. With the new features in OCMock it is now possible to selectively replace individual methods on existing objects. Did I mention that I love the Objective-C runtime?

As usual the release also includes many contributions and bug-fixes from the community. More details on the OCMock page at Mulle Kybernetik.

Over the past years I have shown everyone who could not run fast enough some of the tools based on Moose. And even now I cannot resist putting a screenshot of CodeCity into this post.

Most of the Moose tools now use the MSE file format as an interchange format. By the way, if you are interested in writing your own visualisations or analysis tools it is probably worthwhile looking at MSE, reading this format is so much more convenient than parsing source code.

In Java it was always relatively easy to create MSE files. Among many other things, iPlasma can read Java source code and export to MSE. That said, iPlasma has so many interesting features itself that oftentimes no export to an external tool is necessary.

For C# the story was different and for one reason or another no tool existed that could create MSE files for C#. This has changed now. As a student project at the University of Lugano such a tool was written and, thanks to Michele Lanza, then donated for general use. I’ve made a few improvements and put the code into this Bitbucket repository.

Another major improvement of OCMock: it now supports more flexible constraints on the expected arguments. This is done in the Objective-C way and user-defined constraints don’t have to implement a formal interface, they’re just methods in the test class. As usual this release also includes several contributions from the community. More details on the OCMock page at Mulle Kybernetik.

Working with CruiseControl I’ve always found CCTray a really useful tool… for Windows. Being a Mac user I decided we really need something like this for the Mac and started working on CCMenu this summer. After a few beta releases this has reached version 1.0 yesterday. Check it out here.

This is Open Source week… I finally managed to get out a new release of OCMock, which brings a couple of contributions and improvements around handling of unexpected invocations. The new ‘nice’ mocks simply ignore these, and the framework now rethrows exceptions in verify. Normally, OCMock follows the fail fast (PDF) philosophy, but some frameworks ignore exceptions when they are thrown, and we still want the test to fail. More details on the OCMock page at Mulle Kybernetik.