Raise the SNR

I started working today on creating a rule in FxCop to enforce the use of curly braces on if and for statements. I know that FxCop is built to analyze IL, not source code, so this should be an interesting experience. I’ll blog about it if I’m successful.

UPDATE: I was correct about FxCop not reading the source code. So I was unable to enforce the curly brace rule. I was able to create a custom rule although it was a painful exercise.

The problem with custom FxCop rules is that Microsoft really doesn’t document how to do it. I sent an e-mail and got a very prompt reply from Brad Abrams, Krzysztof Cwalina, and David Kean. The final response I got about the curly braces was from David Kean:

Unfortunately, you will need to parse the source yourself, FxCop (even with the PDB) doesn’t provide enough information. Braces (like whitespace, comments, etc) are a source-only construct.

Here are some of the websites that I used to write the code.

http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2007/02/24/introducing-fxcopunit-a-framework-for-integrated-fxcop-rule-testing.aspx

http://blogs.interknowlogy.com/timmccarthy/archive/2007/02/13/11543.aspx

http://bordecal.mvps.org/Nicole/FxCop/CustomRuleDetails.htm