A Quantum Immortal

Bogen just optimized our visual studio solution by cutting down the number of projects in it from about 60 to 20 something. Compile time is blazing fast now, thanks dude (though this means less time for me to check Google Reader 🙁 )

Objective – Automatically run FxCop on our solution

Possible solution – existing FxCop Community Task

Problems with solution:

1. Only compatible with FxCop 1.32 (hard coded folder path!!!)
2. Accepts only DLLs as input, not a solution (our solution doesn’t have a single output directory, so the DLLs are scattered)

Solution – writing a custom task called FxCopSolution and tweaking the FxCop task.

For now, I couldn’t get a hold of the lead developer, this is not checked in to the main repository in Tigris. The source code and binaries should be in this zip file.

This zip contains:

1. Source – The source for the FxCopSolution task
   1. Unfortunately the unit tests are not very useful, beacuse it’s currently impossible to actually run the task from inside the tes.
   2. I included some 3rd party libraries not included in the original MSBuild release, that were needed to compile it (before my changes).
   3. I had to comment out the Source Safe tasks – they required a lib I didn’t find.
2. Bin – Everything needed to deploy the task
   1. Sample.MSBuild.proj – a sample MSBuild project that uses the task
   2. Build/MSBuildCommunityTasks – a folder containing the binaries
   3. Build/fxcop-summary.xsl – an XSL I found somewhere that translates the output from FxCop to a displayable HTML. It’s not that pretty (suggestions are welcome), but it does the job.

We integrated the task with TeamCity (simply adding another MSBuild build and specifying as artifact Build/Output.html), and now our build displays a huge number of FxCop errors we’ll fix in the following weeks.

If you have any errors using the zip (there are bound to be a few silly ones) and/or questions, feel free to contact me at ron.gross@gmail.com.