Review: Analyze Your Code

Visual Studio Magazine, Leonard Lobel 
8/20/2003

Total .NET Analyzer is a code-analysis tool that helps you build better .NET apps. It integrates with VS.NET as an add-in and functions like any tool window you can dock, undock, or collapse.

You load a VS.NET solution and click on Analyze in the toolbar to conduct an instantaneous analysis of your code. Total .NET Analyzer parses your solution source files and detects potential issues, which appear immediately in a list below the toolbar. Each issue's description includes severity, category, name, project, file, namespace, class, method, line number, and even character position, as well as a preview of the offending source line. You can use intuitive drag-and-drop to organize the issues list by any grouping level. Another toolbar button creates a formatted, printable report of detected issues in a preview window.

Total .NET Analyzer detects more than 150 issues and assigns them to Error, Performance, Standard, Suggestion, Unused, and VB Legacy categories. My favorite category is "Unused," which reveals unused assignments and variables—dead code that invariably winds up lying around once development is complete. The Rule Editor lets you exclude a rule from analysis, change a rule's category or severity, and add notes to a rule that appear when the issue comes up. However, you can't add your own rules.

It's up to you to make the final determination on reported issues. For example, DirectCase is always faster than CType, but only you can decide that it is safe to use DirectCase when you know that the runtype type will always be the same as the specified conversion type. Your own conventions will render some issues as not pertinent in many cases. For example, if you name your controls in "camelCase," you'll receive "PascalCase" issues for every control in your app, because FMS follows Microsoft-suggested naming conventions. You can use the Rule Editor to exclude such issues from being reported. (The product reports many issues—including PascalCase—on code VS.NET generates automatically for strongly typed datasets.)

The documentation is clear and thorough, and technical support is courteous and responsive. The tool had difficulty parsing one of my projects, and a friendly representative handled my call. Within a few days, FMS released a new version that fixed the problem.

If you've ever wished you could have a clone of yourself watching over your shoulder, ensuring that you adhere to best practices, Total .NET Analyzer is for you.

About the Author

Leonard Lobel is the CEO and founder of Sleek Technologies Inc., a development shop specializing in Microsoft-based solutions. He's also the director of software for Government Data Publications in New York, and a consultant and trainer with more than 24 years of experience. Reach him at llobel@sleektechnologies.com.
 

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