Development Matters Blog

FxCop is a free static code analysis tool from Microsoft that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to Microsoft’s .NET Framework Design Guidelines. It will ensure that the specified rules are used in the source code.

FxCop analyzes the compiled object code, not the original source code, and searches for more than 200 different possible coding standards violations.

Sometimes it is needed to automatically remove FxCop related “SuppressMessage” attributes when they are no longer needed.

If you’re using Visual Studio Team System, then FxCop is completely integrated and when you exclude messages it automatically applies the new SuppressMessage attributes to the appropriate location in code.

If you’re using Visual Studio Professional edition, then you have to use the external FxCop.

It turns out you have to enable your project to recognize the SuppressMessage attribute by FIRST adding a condition compilation symbol.

To include this symbol do the following:

For C# projects:
- In Solution Explorer, right-click your project and choose Properties
- In the Properties window, choose the Build tab
- In the Conditional compilation symbols text box enter CODE_ANALYSIS

The next step you have to do is to right-click the error message in FxCop UI and select “Copy As” – “SuppressMessage” (or “Module-level SupressMessage”). Then you can simply paste the attribute into your code at the appropriate location.

The new Visual Studio 2010 RC brings significant changes in the domain of the coded UI tests. You can realize that if you try to build a test project in this new environment as you probably get more than 1000 errors. There are a few errors that seem to happen a few hundred times each:

-’Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UITesting.UITestControlProperties’ is inaccessible due to its protection level.
- The name ‘HtmlProperties’ does not exist in the current context
- The name ‘UITestControlProperties’ does not exist in the current context
- The name ‘WinProperties’ does not exist in the current context

However, you can upgrade your project with an automatic upgrade script to move your automation:

1. Launch the Visual Studio Command Prompt from Start Menu > All Programs> Microsoft Visual Studio 2010> Visual Studio Tools
2. Run the script

   UITestUpgrade.exe < folder to upgrade>

   - The upgrade tool will fix all the changes listed below.
   - All the folders under the specified folder(s) is searched recursively and all projects under it upgraded.
   - If a project is under source control, the upgrade tool will do check out and make changes.
   - Tool will create backup folder with all contents of the specified folder

During a creation and compilation of a Visual Studio project, more files are created in the Debug folder apart from the main output exe file.

They are results of the hosting process feature that was introduced for the first time with VS2005.

Hosting process file, with extension .vshosts.exe, serves main three purposes:

• Improving debugging performance
• Enabling partial trust debugging
• Enabling design time expression evaluation

There are more files created with the vshost file for the Visual Studio project:

• .pdb or the Programm DataBase that contains debug symbols
• .vshost.exe.manifest that contains mostly dependencies on libraries

Also, notice that these files shouldn’t be deployed with the application you finished or run directly.

It’s possible to disable generation vshost files under project settings -> Debug options -> Enable the Visual Studio hosting process checkbox.

You can find more information about the advanced debugging features in a MSDN article.

Writing code documentation has always been a time consuming process. Additionally, reflecting code changes in the already finished documentation proved to be even more time consuming.

Since the beginning of time, code documentation existed only inside the code itself in the form of the in-line comments. However, modern programming languages introduced syntax for the in-line code comments (XML documentation syntax) and brought the capability of generating the external humanly-readable code documentation from these comments.

Visual Studio has a fully integrated support for the XML documentation. In order to use it inside your .NET project you need to enable it on the Build tab of the Properties page of the project.

Once you build the project with the XML documentation option enabled, a list of warnings will be populated with the additional warnings informing you about the missing XML comments.

You can remove these warnings by simply adding the XML comments to each of the publicly visible types from the list. To add XML comment to the publicly visible type, simply type /// on top of it. Visual Studio will automatically generate the required XML comment syntax and all that is left for you to do is to describe it.

XML documentation supports a wide range of the XML tags used for formatting. I will describe these tags in detail in the second part of this post.