--- title: "Two Faced Commits - how the ALT.NET Community is becoming more and more dogmatic" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/19/two-faced-commits-how-the-altnet-community-is-becoming-more.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/19/two-faced-commits-how-the-altnet-community-is-becoming-more.html" published: "2008-05-19T03:50:00" updated: "2008-05-19T03:50:00" tags: [".NET", "Agile", "Agile Related", "General Software Devel...", "Unit Testing"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "disclaimer: I work at Typemock. There is a big trend I am starting to notice in the \"Advanced\" unit testing community. That trend feels more and more like hypocrisy. Take Daniel's post about mocking statics without…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Two Faced Commits - how the ALT.NET Community is becoming more and more dogmatic By Roy Osherove May 19, 2008 In [.NET](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net), [Agile](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile), [Agile Related](https://osherove.com/blog/category/agile-related), [General Software Devel...](https://osherove.com/blog/category/general-software-devel), [Unit Testing](https://osherove.com/blog/category/unit-testing) **Historical article** · Originally published May 19, 2008; technical details may be outdated. disclaimer: I work at Typemock. There is a big trend I am starting to notice in the "Advanced" unit testing community. That trend feels more and more like hypocrisy. Take [Daniel's post about mocking statics without Typemock](http://www.clariusconsulting.net/blogs/kzu/archive/2008/05/18/mock_statics_without_typemock.aspx). (Daniel is the creator of [Moq](http://mockframeworks.com/moq), an open source mocking framework) Granted, it is important to know that you can always refactor things for testability, but just looks at what he writes: "So, don't buy a product just because you're lazy and want to avoid creating a few wrapper classes and interfaces" followed by "Always use the simplest thing that could possibly work." Which is it, community? The idea of being prgamatic is using the right tool for the job. if that tools makes your job easier than not using it "cause you're lazy otherwise" is plain old hypocrisy. The same argument also holds for tools like FinalBuilder vs. Nant\\MsBuild\\Other XML Hell. Tools don't create problems if you use them correctly.  The community (especially the ALT.NET community) is going in a too extreme direction. so extreme that their advice are sometimes skewed too much to be considered pragmatic, sometimes falling into "dogmatic". ## More in .NET [All posts in .NET](https://osherove.com/blog/category/net) - May 27, 2008 ### [DimeCast.net : 10 minute video tutorials on .NET related matters](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/27/dimecastnet-10-minute-video-tutorials-on-net-related-matters.html) - May 21, 2008 ### [Weird error message](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/21/weird-error-message.html) - May 17, 2008 ### ["Swapping" instead of "Injecting" calls between classes](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/17/quotswappingquot-instead-of-quotinjectingquot-calls-between.html) - May 15, 2008 ### [Typemock Isolator 4.2.4 is out](https://osherove.com/blog/2008/5/15/typemock-isolator-424-is-out.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/