VS2010 Custom Code Analysis Rule

Question

I'm trying to write a custom fxcop rule for mstest projects VS2010. I'd like to debug it but keep getting an exception when it tries to load the dll for the mstest project it fails stating that it can't find referenced assembly:

  
   Microsoft.FxCop.Common.AssemblyLoadException
   Could not load C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\20100106-CodeAnalysisRulesBlogDemo\BlogDemo\TestProject1\bin\Debug\TestProject1.dll.
   Microsoft.FxCop.Sdk.InvalidMetadataException
   The following error was encountered while reading module 'TestProject1': Assembly reference cannot be resolved: Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a.

Does anyone have any idea how to resolve this? If I just run the code analysis it works fine but as soon as I try to debug it fails.

Thanks

Answer 1

An alternative to the mess of writing FxCop custom rules, would be to use NDepend and its Code Query language (CQL). CQL is dedicated to write code quality rules that can be verified live in Visual Studio, or that can be verified during build process and reported in a HTML report. Here are a few samples of CQL rules (designed to be highly customizable):

Code refactored recently should be 100% covered by test:

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT METHODS WHERE CodeWasChanged AND PercentageCoverage < 100

Complex methods should be commented:

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT METHODS WHERE CyclomaticComplexity > 15 AND PercentageComment < 10

I don’t want that my User Interface layer to depend directly on the DataBase layer:

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT NAMESPACES WHERE IsDirectlyUsing "DataLayer" AND NameIs "UILayer"

Static fields should not be named m_XXX (Custom naming conventions):

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT FIELDS WHERE NameLike "^m_" AND IsStatic

Methods out of MyAssembly and MyAssembly2 should not have more than 30 lines of code:

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT METHODS OUT OF ASSEMBLIES "MyAssembly1", "MyAssembly2" WHERE NbLinesOfCode > 30

Public methods should not be removed to avoid API breaking changes:

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT METHODS WHERE IsPublic AND IsInOlderBuild AND WasRemoved

Types tagged with the attribute MyNamespace.FullCoveredAttribute must be thoroughly covered by tests:

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT TYPES WHERE HasAttribute "MyNamespace.FullCoveredAttribute" AND PercentageCoverage < 100