Code Analysis Team Blog

I see a lot of users attempting to hand code a SuppressMessageAttribute themselves. This can be error prone and is not needed when both Visual Studio and the standalone FxCop can automatically generate these for you. In Visual Studio 2005 Right...

For Visual Studio 2008, we have added a new MSBuild property that allows you to easily treat all Code Analysis warnings as build errors. This can be useful for example, if you want to force that any firing of a Code Analysis rule to break the build during...

By default, the FxCop naming and design rules only fire on publicly visible types and members. There are a couple reasons for this: The .NET Framework Design Guidelines , which FxCop enforces, only contains guidelines for publicly visible API. What...

Roy Osherove has put together a Framework for testing FxCop rules . It's an interesting approach, firing up the FxCop engine for each rule that he wants to test. There are few things that I would like to see it support: The ability to specify...

Daniel Fisher has posted a entry on using a macro to quickly enable Code Analysis on multiple projects . The macro also allows you to apply the same rule selections across an entire solution. Thanks Daniel!

Some of the local Australian developers have got together and written a e-book on Writing Quality Code with Visual Studio Team System. It contains chapters on both Native and Managed Code Analysis, as well unit and web testing, performance-tuning and...

Did you know you can get more information about a particular rule/warning within Visual Studio; including its description, information on how to fix it, whether or not it is considered a breaking change, when or when not to suppress it and code samples...

Update: A Virtual PC image is also available. We've just released the Visual Studio 'Orcas' - January CTP . This is the first of the side-by-side installable CTPs, however, before installing, please read the Release Notes and do not install this on...

On the forums, we have had posts from customers who want to customize their code analysis policy to skip certain file types such as .sql, docs etc. This is because the policy will block checkins even though code analysis doesn’t apply to those files....

It appears that sometimes FxCop displays a link to the source line and file in the Message Details window and sometimes it doesn't. Why this inconsistent behavior? There are three usual reasons why this occurs: Source lookup is disabled. To turn...

We had two great chats last Friday . Thank-you to all that attended, I had a lot of fun. The following is a list of Code Analysis questions that were asked: Code Metrics DavidKean_MS (Moderator): Q: JeffBe: I'm very interested in the code...

Krzysztof Cwalina, owner of the Framework Design Guidelines , has written a great post on designing exception hierarchies . He gives a great overview on the different categories of exceptions, which are placed under two main buckets he calls usage and...

I want to fire on the naming of a local, however, whenever I pass the local to the Problem constructor, the source information for the method is always used. How do I get FxCop/Code Analysis to use the source information for the local instead? Because...

SearchVB.com is offering a free sample chapter on Managed Code Analysis from the book Professional Visual Studio Team System (co-written by fellow Team System colleague Noah Coad ). Chapter 8, Managed Code Analysis, focuses on how to use Team System...

One of things that we are doing for Orcas, is to basically do what we call a resolution scrub . This is where we print out every single possible resolution/warning and read over them to check for consistency, proper grammer and to see if they provide...

A while ago I mentioned that FxCop (and hence Managed Code Analysis) naming and design rules only fire on publicly visible types and members. As you may recall, there were a couple of reason for this: The .NET Framework Design Guidelines , which...

Our excellent program manager, Joe Rohde, is trying to gather information on the kinds of custom rules customers want to write. I am a program manager for our Code Analysis system. I want to know what kind of custom rules you would like to write...

Previously we showed you how to access the locals or variables of a method. Once you started to run your rule over an assembly, you might start to notice strange locals with names that start with 'CS$' and 'VB$'. These are compiler generated locals that...

A lecture on API design by Krzysztof Cwalina (the brains behind the Framewok Design Guidelines ) has been posted on the Research Channel . This class presents best practices for designing frameworks that are reusable object-oriented libraries. The...

Nicole Calinoiu has started a (what I hope to be long) series on introducing Code Analysis (FxCop in particular) to your team. Her first couple of posts are absolute rippers , check them out: FxCop and the big, bad backlog FxCop backlogs: Some rules...

Update: The transcript for this chat can be found here . Once again we had another really successful chat with over 320 customers attending. Thank you to all that attended, you asked some really good questions. The following is a list of questions...

Update: The transcript for this chat can be found here . Yesterday we had a really successful Team System chat with over 150 customers (including 7 MVPs). Thank you to all that attended, it is really great to be able to speak to customers directly...

Well...okay, I lied, it's actually the same great forum as before, it's just been renamed. Visual Studio Code Analysis and Code Metrics Discuss issues regarding Visual Studio's Code Analysis features, including both Managed and C/C++ Code Analysis...

While this may be old news to some, we've had a few reports recently of bugs that were already fixed in Visual Studio Service Pack 1 , so it appears that not everyone is running it. We fixed over 30+ bugs ourselves in Managed Code Analysis, so if you...

Mike Fanning, Krzysztof Cwalina , and Brad Abrams were awarded with the Engineering Excellence Chairman's Award for the design of FxCop, which is given for contributions that Bill Gates considers extremely important: The Engineering Excellence Chairman...