My Toolbox column in the December 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine is avaiable online. The December issue examines:
- Improving Software Quality with Static Code Analysis Tools, in which three tools are examined:
- FxCop - a free tool from Microsoft that examines compiled assemblies for conformance to Microsoft's official Design Guidelines for Developing Class Libraries. This includes checks for naming, type design, exceptions, and so forth.
- StyleCop - another free tool from Microsoft. StyleCop examines the C# source code (rather than a compiled assembly) and reports any violations against a defined coding style. For example, StyleCop will warn you if you indent loops using spaces instead of tabs (if you have it configured as such), or if you omit white space from both sides of operators like == and !=.
- CodeIt.Right - a third-party tool that integrates within Visual Studio and provides similar conformace tests as FxCop and StyleCop. Some of the advantages of CodeIt.Right over FxCop and StyleCop include a much easier mechanism for creating and defining custom rules and the ability to refactor violating code into conforming code with the click of the mouse.
- Blogs of Note - Matt Berseth. Matt's blog is an excellent resource for ASP.NET and AJAX development, and includes a level of detail and professionalism not found in most blogs. Most of Matt's entries show how to do some cool task with ASP.NET and AJAX. There are a plethora of screen shots in virtually every blog entry, along with downloadable source code and online demos.
There was no book review in this issue.
Enjoy! - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd263071.aspx
As always, if you have any suggestions for products, blogs, or books to review for the Toolbox column, please send them to toolsmm@microsoft.com.