I’m happy to announce that MockingBird v2 has been released by the project coordinator Santosh Benjamin. What is MockingBird? Well I’ll let Santosh explain it with his elevator pitch for MockingBird:

MockingBird is a tool-set for mocking web services.

Consider the scenario where you are given the WSDL for a third-party web-service but no functioning system is available yet (it may be a brand new service or perhaps dev/site licenses are being negotiated). You need to get on with development right now. What do you code against? If you are into TDD & MockObjects you may look to mock up an interface corresponding to the WSDL and develop against that. But what if you ‘don’t do’ TDD & Mocks? Or it may be that you are maintaining/enhancing an existing system that wasn’t coded against interfaces so mocking may not be possible. Or what if you are a BizTalk developer? You cannot mock/inject dependencies into your orchestrations and other components (well, except for pipeline components, but thats another story)!!

Next, imagine that you are setting up a build server and multiple environments (DEV, TEST, UAT etc). But the vendor says you can only have one license for their software. Now how do you run DEV, TEST, UAT in parallel with different data sets? Or you may have more than one license, but what if that service has maintenance schedules that clash with your build? Your build server is then completely exposed to something you don’t control.

Being able to set up complete mock services is invaluable in these scenarios. Unfortunately there aren’t many tools available to help with this so we have to resort to manually coding mock services. MockingBird aims to make it easy and quick to build configurable mock services.

We use MockingBird in order to do rapid development for BizTalk and also to help create repeatable test cases to comprehensively test BizTalk applications. Since we use MockingBird extensively ourselves we were pleased to contribute some code to the v2 release, including an option to use XSLT to dynamically generate a web service response.

It’s a fantastic tool for BizTalk development so I’d encourage you to install it and try it out. Alternatively have a look at the videos that Santosh has produced here