For those that are interested, I've just started a new personal blog, Dave's Box , where I will be talking about FxCop, Framework Design Guidelines, and the recently announced Managed Extensibility Framework . I've just posted a couple of posts detailing changes we made to FxCop 1.36: FxCop now...

Code analysis defect counts are available in the cube that is part of the TFS Data Warehouse . This post shows you how to hook up Excel to show code analysis counts in a pivot table . First off you need to connect Excel up to the data warehouse that has the data. Under the Data tab in Excel select From...

Join members of the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Team Foundation Server, Team Suite, Architecture Edition, Development Edition, Database Edition, and Test Edition. In addition, discuss what's new for these editions for Visual Studio 2008. We will be holding...

We have a great new feature that we are previewing in Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System code name “Rosario” November 2007 CTP .  This feature allows you to select pre-defined sets of rules to configure code analysis as well as define your own.  To access this feature...

Another question that is coming up is: How can (or should) code metrics be presented to management ? My view is that in all cases the metrics are something that can help make decisions around focus and prioritization. Management should be made aware of the metrics and what they mean to allow them to...

Another question: The maintainability index has been re-set to lie between 0 and 100. How and why was this done? The metric originally was calculated as follows: Maintainability Index = 171 - 5.2 * ln(Halstead Volume) - 0.23 * (Cyclomatic Complexity) - 16.2 * ln(Lines of Code) This meant that...

This is the first in a series of posts around questions I am getting asked related to code metrics. One question that is coming up is: Can a check-in policy be defined based on code metrics in TFS? Well, code metrics itself does not have a check-in policy but fortunately the Maintainability...

A number of people have asked: Is there a way to customize the existing code metrics or add additional ones? The simple answer at this time is No.  There are no extension points or customizations available at this time for code metrics.  This feature was added late in the cycle for VS 2008...

While we've already briefly spoken about Code Metrics when we announced it , I thought I would discuss it in a little more depth, in particular the metrics it provides. As mentioned previously, Code Metrics is a new tool window that helps users find and act upon complex and unmaintainable areas within...

While Ian Huff has already talked about the new 'Developer' menu that has been added to Visual Studio 2008, I thought I would briefly mention some of the changes to it that were made between Beta 2 and RTM. For those that have yet to see this menu, similar to the existing Test menu, we've added a...

One of my favorite new features for Code Analysis in Visual Studio 2008 is our support for analyzing anonymous methods and lambda expressions. While anonymous methods have been around in C# since Visual Studio 2005, lambda expressions are new for both C# and Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008. For...

One not very well known feature that lights up when connected to a Team Foundation Server, is the ability to enforce that Code Analysis be run before every check-in. Called a Code Analysis Policy , this feature allows your team to find and fix Code Analysis warnings earlier in the product cycle rather...

Once you turn on the new spelling rules that we've added to Visual Studio 2008, you will want to start to customize the words that it fires on; this is where the new custom dictionary support comes in. A custom dictionary in its basic form, similar to the concept in Microsoft Word, allows you to silence...

Surprisingly, one the biggest requests for Code Analysis in Visual Studio 2005 was to include the spelling rules that shipped with the FxCop standalone. We had Microsoft consultants tell us that they actually had trouble moving some customers from FxCop to Code Analysis because they were not included...

I've recently received a few requests asking about the Code Analysis rules we run internally against Microsoft's own code. While it might come as a surprise, we do not actually run every single rule against our own binaries. There are many reasons for this: Applicability . Not every rule is applicable...