Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 7, Help and Research

#65 Follow the Rules with FxCop

HACK

FxCop fixed this major annoyance, so you can continuously run Visual Stu-

dio and FxCop side by side.

To see your number of FxCop messages decrease, make the necessary code

changes in Visual Studio, recompile, then flip back over to FxCop and hit

the F5 key to reanalyze your assembly. In our example, I’m going to fix two

messages: “Declare types in namespaces” and “Identifiers should be cased

correctly”. After fixing these two issues, my FxCop results look like

Figure 7-30.

A Look at the Rules

Now that you’ve seen how to use FxCop and what it’s good for, you must

be wondering where all those rules are and whether you really need to ana-

lyze all your assemblies against every single rule FxCop has. The answer is

no. Although that is strongly suggested, the FxCop team understands that

not everyone can abide by all the rules set forth in the .NET Framework

Design Guidelines all the time. Therefore, they’ve made it very easy to pick

and choose which rules will be used in the analysis of your .NET assem-

blies. By default, all rules are used during the analysis, but that can be easily

changed.

To see the rules, click the Rules tab in the left pane of FxCop. You will see

Figure 7-31.

Notice that all rules are expandable and can be checked or unchecked as

needed. For instance, if you choose to ignore all interoperability rules, you

would