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Monday, 19 November 2012

FxCop Standalone for VS 2012, .NET 4.5 and Portable Libraries

In our current team environment we are using the VS 2012 Professional SKU with a MSDN subscription due to the cost savings it affords us.  That implies that we miss out on features like the integrated Code Analysis.  Up till VS 2010, Microsoft released an updated edition of the Code Analysis engine with the standalone FxCop installation.  That implied that even though we didn’t get the tooling integrated into Visual Studio directly, at least we could use the standalone edition of FxCop to execute the same set of Code Analysis rules on our code base - albeit in a bit more laborious fashion.

With VS 2012 Microsoft has not yet released an update to the standalone FxCop.  Here’s the MSDN forum post where I raised the issue as to when an update will be released.  The current standalone edition also doesn’t seem to support the new Portable Library format being used to cross target different .NET platforms.  Following the advise on the forum post I’ve created an UserVoice issue to request an update.  So if you are in the same boat as to using the standalone edition, please head over to UserVoice and go vote for the issue to get it resolved.  Thanks.

PS: Btw, if you would like to run the standalone FxCop in VS, you might want to consider the FxCop Integrator.  Haven’t used it, but it seems promising although there hasn’t been an update for a while.