3/27/2012 Update: According to the Moles page, the Moles framework has been integrated into Visual Studio 11 as the Fakes framework and Moles is no longer under active development.   After a quick review of the changes it appears that most of this guide still applies but there are a few changes to be aware of:

• Mole types are now referred to as Shim types
• The configuration file now has a .fakes extension
• The generated types are now placed in a .Fakes namespace (i.e.: System.Fakes)

6/25/2012 Update: In preparation for my Faking It talk covering the Fakes framework I compiled a list of the notable differences between Moles and Fakes. There are quite a few more than I listed above so if you’re using this post as an introduction to either framework you’ll probably want to look them over.

Despite having been around for several years I hadn’t heard about Microsoft’s Moles framework until a few months ago when one of my teammates mentioned it during the 2011 Indy GiveCamp. I was interested in learning more about it at the time but given how we were running on caffeine I’m not surprised I forgot about it until he mentioned it again a few weeks ago. This time I was much more alert and started reading about it almost immediately. After seeing what Moles offered and not finding much in the way of resources for it on the Web I knew I needed to spread the word.

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