What advantages or features does TypeMock Isolator Essential have vs Basic?

Question

I'm setting up continuous integration and deployment for my companies Azure based web service. I'm already committed to using TypeMock Isolator, but I'm not certain if we're going to need Essential or if the Basic version is going to do what I need. Can anyone tell me exactly what advantages and/or features the Essential version has that the Basic version doesn't? The website is really lacking in specificity here, it just has some vague text about "test anything."

So far I've found one difference, which is Essential allows one to test in "DesignMode.Pragmatic" mode. This appears to allow me to assign to read only properties. Sure, that's useful, but I'm not sure if that's going to save me enough time to justify the $800 price tag. Can anyone else tell me what else the "Pragmatic" design mode allows?

Thanks in advance, Nathan C. Tresch

Answer 1

Typemock isolator essential (and above) is typically used when you want to mock out things that are statically bound, such as concrete dependencies (where dependencies aren't interfaces / abstract classes).

For instance, suppose you had a class that did file manipulation using System.IO, if you wanted to write a unit test, you would need to mock out some static methods or concrete implementations of the File class, typemock isolator essential (and above) will let you do this, while the basic will only let you mock out interfaces / abstract classes (similar to Moq).