Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Microsoft Fakes for all Visual Studio editions

If you have read about or heard about the Microsoft Fakes framework, you may know that it is the successor to Microsoft Pex and Moles.

Microsoft Pex and Moles was originally made freely available as a download from the Microsoft Research site.  Unfortunately, however, Microsoft Fakes was only originally included with Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate edition.  Later on, Microsoft made a concession and included it also with Visual Studio Premium edition and above.

For most development teams that are Microsoft Partners, being restricted to Visual Studio Premium edition or above is usually OK.  However, the big problem with this restriction is that many companies are not Microsoft partners or are instead Microsoft customers which leverage Microsoft tooling to develop their own internal IT solutions.  In Offshore scenarios, this problem is even greater since very few Offshore development companies have access to Visual Studio Premium edition.  Many Offshore development companies are running on thin budgets and only have access to Visual Studio Professional edition.  Therefore, incorporating a framework such as Microsoft Fakes in a distributed development team becomes nearly impossible.

If you believe that Microsoft should make the Microsoft Fakes framework freely available as it formerly did with Microsoft Pex and Moles, you can vote for this UserVoice item here:

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/7017401-make-microsoft-fakes-free-like-pex-and-moles

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