How do you count the lines of code in a Visual Studio solution?

Question

Hi,

Is it possible to find the number of lines of code in an entire solution? I've heard of MZ-Tools but is there an open source equivalent?

Answer 1

You could use:

• SCLOCCount http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/- Open source
• loc metrics, http://www.locmetrics.com/ - not open source, but easy to use

Answer 2

An open source line counter for VS2005, 2003 and 2002 is available here:

http://www.wndtabs.com/

There is also discussion of creating a line counting VS addin, complete with code on Codeproject, here

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/macros/LineCounterAddin.aspx

Also Slick Edit Gadgets have a nice line-counter, here:

http://www.slickedit.com/content/view/441

and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 includes a good line counter.

Just remember though:

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight. Bill Gates

Answer 3

In Visual Studio Team System 2008 you can do from the menu Analyze--> 'Calculate Code Metrics for Solution' and it will give you a line count of your entire solution (among other things g)

Answer 4

I've found powershell useful for this. Because I consider LoC to be a pretty bogus metric anyway, I don't believe anything more formal should be required.

From a smallish solution's directory:

PS C:\Path> (dir -include *.cs,*.xaml -recurse | select-string .).Count
8396
PS C:\Path>

That will count the non-blank lines in all the solution's .cs and .xaml files. For a larger project, I just used a different extension list:

PS C:\Other> (dir -include *.cs,*.cpp,*.h,*.idl,*.asmx -recurse | select-string .).Count
909402
PS C:\Other>

Why use an entire app when a single command-line will do it? :)

Answer 5

cloc is an excellent commandline, Perl-based, Windows-executable which will break down the blank lines, commented lines, and source lines of code, grouped by file-formats.

Now it won't specifically run on a VS solution file, but it can recurse through directories, and you can set up filename filters as you see fit.

Here's the sample output from their web page:

prompt> cloc perl-5.10.0.tar.gz
    4076 text files.
    3883 unique files.                                          
    1521 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.07  T=10.0 s (251.0 files/s, 84566.5 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perl               2052    110356    112521    309778 x   4.00 =     1239112.00
C                   135     18718     22862    140483 x   0.77 =      108171.91
C/C++ Header        147      7650     12093     44042 x   1.00 =       44042.00
Bourne Shell        116      3402      5789     36882 x   3.81 =      140520.42
Lisp                  1       684      2242      7515 x   1.25 =        9393.75
make                  7       498       473      2044 x   2.50 =        5110.00
C++                  10       312       277      2000 x   1.51 =        3020.00
XML                  26       231         0      1972 x   1.90 =        3746.80
yacc                  2       128        97      1549 x   1.51 =        2338.99
YAML                  2         2         0       489 x   0.90 =         440.10
DOS Batch            11        85        50       322 x   0.63 =         202.86
HTML                  1        19         2        98 x   1.90 =         186.20
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:               2510    142085    156406    547174 x   2.84 =     1556285.03
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The third generation equivalent scale is a rough estimate of how much code it would take in a third generation language. Not terribly useful, but interesting anyway.

Answer 6

Other simple tool For VS2008 (open source): http://www.accendo.sk/Download/SourceStat.zip

Answer 7

Found this tip: LOC with VS Find and replace

Not a plugin though if thats what you are looking for.

Answer 8

A simple solution is to search in all files. Type in "*" while using wildcards. Which would match all lines. At the end of the find results window you should see a line of the sort:

Matching lines: 563 Matching files: 17 Total files searched: 17

Of course this is not very good for large projects, since all lines are mached and loaded into memory to be dispayed at the find results window.

Answer 9

I prefer OxyProject Metrics VS Addin.

Answer 10

Try neptuner. It also gives you stuff like spaces, tabs, Lines of comments in addition to LoC. http://neptuner.googlecode.com/files/neptuner_0_30_windows.zip