FxCop and Code Analysis: Writing Your Own Custom Rules

This web site is designed to address the shortage of documentation on the FxCop 1.36 API.

The information available here is relevant for developers of rules that target both the free standalone FxCop tool and the Code Analysis feature of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition.

Some of the highlights include the following:

1. A brief tutorial of FxCop
2. A listing of what kinds of customizations are possible with FxCop
3. An overview of the introspection API
4. How to implement custom rules
5. How to write the XML description resource for the custom rules
6. An advanced section on using FxCop to check doc comments
7. Example rules

A tool called Introspector is also available here that lets you browse assemblies using the FxCop introspection object model. This lets you see precisely which objects are involved when you develop custom rules.

I hope that you find this site useful.

These materials are currently considered to be in the "beta" stage, as they are written for the FxCop 1.36 Beta. Comments to jason@binarycoder.net are welcome.

FxCop and Code Analysis: Writing Your Own Custom Rules v1.4

• As a web site (recommended for browsing)
• As a PDF file (371KB, recommended for printing)

Introspector v1.4 (Requires FxCop 1.36 Beta)

• As a ZIP file (40KB)
• C# source code ZIP file (20KB)