I am trying to get FxCop to work in a way that it analyses only the incremental changes in the exe/dll that it analyses and not the entire thing as it has anlaysed that part already.... any thoughts how one could achieve this?? ... thanks in advance...
Regards,
ASV...
I think it would be too much hassle to get this to happen. My advice would be to pick the fx cop rules that you can live with, and get all the errors/warnings out of your code. That way if another team member changes something, you will spot it, unless they are writing code that passes. in which case there is no problem.
Unless you are working on some masive project that takes ages to check with fxcop, I think this should be ok and there is no reason to only check incremental changes.
If you are in a situation where a project has got so big that it takes ages to analyse, consider refactoring. In a Visual Studio context, wherever you have folders in a project, consider making them into new projects. This will help with separation in your code, and make it possible to analyse parts of the whole solution, rather than the whole solution and all it's projects, most of which will have no changes.
Refactoring will often be quicker, with less of a learning curve, than making a really customised testing setup to compensate for a difficult scenario.
This is similar to this question.
It is possible, but the results will not be 100% accurate. In an nutshell, you run the analysis on your assembly and produce a report. After the assembly changes, run the analysis again, set the FXCop project to report only new errors and import the old report as the baseline. It is best to do this with the fxcopcmd.exe rather than the UI.
The reason the results will not be 100% accurate is that it is not a trivial task to match the old report to the new code. Lines shift, code is refactored, violations get fixed, new violations are introduced, etc. So, you may get some violations reported again in the changed assemblies, even though they were reported before. But overall, fxcop does a pretty decent job creating a diff report.