I’m working on an overhaul of the internal web server for CR_Documentor and in doing that I’m making sure to have some good unit testing in there. Unfortunately, pretty much everything around the HttpListener class is sealed so it makes testing difficult. Typemock Isolator to the rescue!

To that end, I had to get a license for Isolator to use with my open source project. Typemock has a model for this, and the licenses are free for the asking, but there’s not a lot of information on their site (yet) about exactly how this works. They have a decent blog entry on it, and I’ve found out a little more about them, so I’ll just bullet point it all here.

• You can get a license for Typemock Isolator to use on open source projects from their request page.
• The license is free.
• The license is per-developer. Each developer working on the open source project needs to request one.
• The license has a 10-year lifespan on it so you’re not in danger of having it expire on you in the middle of your project.
• If you have your project running in continuous integration, you can use one of the developer’s licenses for the build server- you don’t have to get a separate license for the server.
• If you work on more than one open source project that needs Typemock Isolator, you only need one open source license - you don’t need a separate license for every project.
• If you already have a commercial (paid) license, you can use your commercial license on the open source project. You don’t need to request a separate license.
• Everyone on a project needs to use the same version of Typemock Isolator. You can’t mix-and-match versions.

This is fantastic. For CR_Documentor, it means I can test not only the new server stuff, but also start adding tests for the code that interacts with the DXCore parser, since you can’t really create those structures in unit tests, either.