Note: Cross posted from The Typemock Insider Blog.

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At the same day I posted about different usages of Isolator in the real world, that are not just regular faking, Travis Illig contacted me about an experiment he’s doing, which obviously succeeded.

Travis, a Typemock MVP, used Isolator to change the behavior of a single method inside 3rd party code, running in a Windows service that was giving him pain. The pain was removed by allowing Isolator to run inside the production code, intercept the offending call, and redirect it to another implementation. Now, how cool is that?

I’ve discussed with Travis other ways to intercept and modify calls. The first one Travis suggested is using a Swap.AllInstances of the offending type and then using a WhenCalled-DoInstead combo, to intercept the call and execute another piece of code instead.

The second option is redirecting the calls to another object, as Travis solution does. In this case, you redirect calls from one object to another. Only methods that have the same signature get redirected. All others are executed on the original object.

The final option is using CThru. With CThru you specify all the method calls you want to intercept, and then implement an event handler that is invoked when the method is intercepted.

For all these to work, you need the Isolator engine to run, and that’s why the environment variables are set. Basically, you can run TMockRunner and do the same thing, although it does get a little heavy when handling Windows services.

Well done Travis! Another reminder that innovation comes from everywhere – when people use a tool differently than what it was intended for, great things can happen.