Product Review: FMS Total .NET Analyzer

VS.NET, Danny J. Lesandrini
12/2003

I've been putting off this product review because I'm not an expert in .NET and I don't want to pass myself off as one. Oddly enough, my inexperience with VB.NET is exactly what made it possible for me to appreciate this product, Total .NET Analyzer by FMS Inc. So, whether you're a .NET expert or a novice, you may benefit from this helpful tool.

FMS is the leading developer of tools for Microsoft application developers. Their award-winning utilities for Microsoft Access are a must for any serious Access programmer. In 1998 they broke into the Visual Basic market, and in 2001 they introduced a line of SQL Server analysis utilities. When Visual Studio .NET was released, FMS was ready with several products, including a cross-reference utility, a code library, and a code analysis tool. This review focuses on the latter, FMS Total .NET Analyzer, but you can read about their entire line at http://www.fmsinc.com.

Let me begin by telling you up front what it's going to cost and what you'll get for those precious IT budget dollars. The price for a single user license is $499, which makes this product among the most expensive of third-party tools I've reviewed. There are quantity breaks when purchasing multiple licenses and when buying it as part of the Total NET Development Suite, bundled with the other .NET tools mentioned earlier.

According to the FMS Web site, Total .NET Analyzer increases the quality and performance of your Microsoft Visual Studio .NET applications. With lightning-quick speed, Total .NET Analyzer detects more than 150 potential issues in your C# and Visual Basic .NET project source code. A punch list of what you can expect includes the following:

? Quickly get up to speed in .NET

? Improve performance

? Avoid .NET traps and hidden bugs

? Learn .NET best practices

? Simplify code management

Many VB developers are easing their way into .NET projects with nothing more than years of classic VB experience and a couple of good .NET instruction books. If that's the situation you're in, then yes, FMS Total .NET Analyzer will live up to the hype and deliver. It will help you get up to speed, improve performance, remove hidden bugs, and teach you .NET best practices.

About a year ago, I started my first commercial .NET project: a Web site for the State of Colorado Division of Wildlife. It was a small ASP.NET intranet project titled LAR (Land Acquisition Request) to be written in VB.NET with the data stored in SQL Server. Other than some client-side validation, all application logic was placed in code-behind modules.

After I finished the application, I ran the FMS Total .NET Analyzer against my code and was shocked at what I saw. Mind you, I started this project with no formal .NET training. I relied on my classic VB experience, a .NET how-to book, and the modern miracle of IntelliSense. The results of the analysis suggested 2,206 issues with my code. Sure, I may be a .NET novice, but that seemed somewhat high for a Web application with only 18 pages. That's when I discovered the purpose of the Rule Editor.

You'll notice that Figure 1 displays some examples of the kinds of issues identified by Total .NET Analyzer?"things like Boxing, Unused Code, Option Strict Not Set, and so forth. I discovered that many of these issues weren't important to me and I didn't want to see them in the list. This is where the Rule Editor comes in. The Rule Editor, shown in Figure 2, allows you to filter the output list for only the types of issues you want to view, making the list more manageable.

Figure 1

Figure 2

One issue that was identified in about 80 places was a violation of what's called the NameLength rule. This issue often turned up in VS.NET-generated code, such as in the Page_Load event handler, where variables are sometimes given single character identifiers. In other cases, it was my variable declarations that were flagged as needing attention.

ByVal e As System.EventArgs
Dim i As Integer

Naturally, this confused me, as I saw nothing wrong with the preceding code, nor did the creators of Visual Studio .NET, since some of the suspect code was theirs. Using a single character, such as i or x, is an old VB habit that seemed perfectly acceptable to me. Accordingly, I turned to the FMS Total .NET Analyzer Help file to find out what the problem was. Clicking on the issue once loads the module with the offending code and advances you to the line containing the violation. Once selected, clicking the Information button in the toolbar loads the Help file page that explains the issue. The Help file provided the following advice for the NameLength rule:

Lengthen variable names to describe the purpose of the variable.

Remarks

In general, variable names should be between 4 and 32 characters long, and should describe the purpose of the variable. Short variable names often don't identify the purpose of the variable, and make your code difficult to understand, debug, and maintain.

Total .NET Analyzer identifies variables with names shorter than the minimum length specified in the Rule Editor. The default minimum length for variable names is 3, but you can change this number as desired.

Resolution

In order to make your code easier to read and understand, you should rename your variable to be more descriptive.

See Also

Naming Conventions

As you might imagine, I didn't consider this a serious issue for the performance or readability of my code. The same applies to another issue that popped up 350 times, related to the rule named Hungarian. It seems that in Visual Studio .NET, Microsoft has changed its standard for naming conventions, and no longer recommends Hungarian notation. While that's good to know, I didn't want to be bothered with these issues while reviewing my code, so I used the Rule Editor to disable these rules and ran the Analyzer again, removing these issues from consideration.

Up to this point, I've mostly just explained how Total .NET Analyzer works, and in fact, the interface is quite simple with very few functions:

? Click Analyze to analyze your code.

? Click Rule Editor to filter the issues list.

? Click the Information button to understand why the code was flagged as an issue.

That's all there is to using this utility. It's completely integrated into the Visual Studio environment, with dockable windows that may be hidden just like other VS windows (see Figure 3). So, if it's so simple, where's the bang for the buck?

Figure 3

The real value of FMS Total .NET Analyzer can be summed up in two words: best practices. What I discovered was that while my classic VB style code was supported, it wasn't always the way of .NET. Just because your code compiles doesn't mean it's correct. Figure 2 shows references to issues under the category VB Legacy, identifying practices to avoid and instructing you on the Visual Studio .NET equivalents.

By reviewing each of the Total .NET Analyzer rules violated and reading the associated Help files, I was able to generate code that looked more like a .NET project than a classic VB project. For example, string concatenation is well known to be inefficient in Visual Basic. The StringAddition rule identifies instances where you'd be better off using the new .NET StringBuilder class. The following example, modified to fit in the printed page, shows the VB .NET way to create a concatenated string:

Dim sb As System.Text.StringBuilder
sb = New System.Text.StringBuilder("SELECT * ")
sb.Append("FROM ParcelQuestionPage07")
sb.Append("WHERE ParcelID=")
sb.Append(intParcelID.ToString)

By reading the Help file associated with each violated rule, I learned, among other things, about boxing, variable typing, and effective use of the new style error handling. The Analyzer utility found unused variables and functions, identified empty Catch statements, and revealed other important irregularities in my code, which I had overlooked. After reviewing each issue, I was able to deliver my code to the client with confidence. It was my first .NET project, but my code looked like that of an experienced .NET developer.

I've always been a fan of FMS utilities, and I was excited to see their .NET line when it came out. Personally, I wasn't disappointed by Total .NET Analyzer and I highly recommend it. If you're new to .NET and you do well learning new technology on your own, as I do, this tool will be invaluable for its best practice advice. For me it was like taking an advanced self-study course in VB.NET. If you're an expert, you'll still find it helpful to have another "set of eyes" checking your code for errors and performance issues. In my opinion, this is a great utility that's worth the price of admission.

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