Static Code Analysis

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to perform static code analysis to identify potential problem areas and known defects. Using the PREfast tool, you can eliminate a majority of the problems that may cause your code to have potential security holes and other instabilities. You can suppress messages and ensure that some messages are treated as warnings and others are treated as errors. On the whole, this makes working with C/C++ code much safer.

With the FxCop tool, you can ensure that your code is compliant with the latest Microsoft specifications for writing .NET code. This provides a well-structured, robust code base, which you can expand easily. In addition, as an organization using this tool to enforce coding standards specific to your needs, you can provide custom rules or more advanced rule checking than the defaults provided by FxCop. Combined with the check-in policy feature of VSTS (discussed in Chapter 3), FxCop can ensure that code created with VSTS conforms to your organization’s standards.