FxCop 1.36 and StyleCop 4.3

posted on 18 Jan 2009 | Tools | Visual Studio

While this is not new news, I realized that finding the link to download FxCop 1.36 is still not as straight forward as I'd like it to be (most links are still pointing to the 1.35 on msdn code or the 1.36 Beta 2 release), so I thought I would add the link here so I can find it again, or anyone else for that matter.

FxCop 1.36 download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9aeaa970-f281-4fb0-aba1-d59d7ed09772&DisplayLang=en
Whats new in FxCop 1.36 can be found in this post on the MS Visual Studio Code Analysis Team Blog.

For those who haven't used it before, FxCop is a tool to analyze .NET assemblies based on a set of rules in order to find potential defects or design issues. The tool comes with a lot of very helpful built in analysis rules that are broken out into seperate categories (e.g. Performance, Design, Globalization, etc..). A lot of Continuous Integration tools have the ability to include FxCop analysis as part of a build so that the warnings FxCop generates can be tracked over time (hopefully in the downward direction).

And on a somewhat related note, I also wanted to add the download link for StyleCop, which ironically, is easy to find even though I'm pretty sure a lot more people are using FxCop.

StyleCop 4.3 download: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/sourceanalysis/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx
Updates and news about StyleCop can be found on the StyleCop Blog.

StyleCop is a tool which analyzes C# source code using a set of rules (much like FxCop) in order to enforce code styling guidelines. It can be used in Continuous Integration projects to verify code style rules are being met. The rule documentation is also available at the link above. I have found reading the rule justifications to be quite educational at times, especially since many of the StyleCop rules run counter to common .NET programming practices that I've seen.