CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.net.net-2.0
anon
anon

Reputation:

C# code analysis - VS 2005

I have a C# user control project which causes intermittent .NET run time error, a generic error, and wondering if there is any code analysis tool that I can point at my .sln file which would tell me what may be causing my error

Upvotes: 3

Views: 256

Answers (5)

vaucouleur
vaucouleur

Reputation: 116

NDepend is fully integrated in VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010. So you can simply point NDepend to the sln that you wish to analyze, and NDepend will build a full report for you.

In a few clicks, you can visualize which types depends on which types, etc. This will obviously not magically solve all your problems, but that is likely to put you on the right track.

Upvotes: 0

Bob The Janitor
Bob The Janitor

Reputation: 20802

As far as tools go FX Cop is really good for doing Code Analysis and it's free but something else to look at is http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/ for doing on the fly code Analysis and it promotes good development practices.

But these may be the wrong tools for the job and may not solve the problem your having, the code may be syntactically correct but there is a logic error that is causing your problem it's like a spellchecker, all words my be spelled correct "Evert bird is conical" means something completely different than "Every word is correct".

Your probably going to need to spend some time in the debugger or using some form of trace tool like dotTrace Profiler there are a couple more out on Visual Studio Gallery like http://www.debuginspector.com/

Upvotes: 0

vgru
vgru

Reputation: 51292

But I would not confuse static analysis tool with a debugger, and I believe what you need here is debugging. In other words, FxCop might tell you that everything's great, but you can still get a run time exception.

Some errors in run-time can be really difficult to spot simply by looking at the code (race conditions with multiple threads, for example). So there is no "code analysis tool" that could a run-time exception simply by analyzing the code.

Check this link for some examples on debugging: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms954594.aspx. You will have probably have to do some stepping through your code using a debugger, maybe Trace some data to a log file, and then try to find exactly where it goes wrong.

Upvotes: 0

Robert MacLean
Robert MacLean

Reputation: 39290

What you need is a Static Code Analysis tool - Besides FXCop which JaredPar mentioned there are others.

Another option I have found recently which gives a useful way of finding issues like this is PEX which does white box unit testing. So when you run the PEX explorations it will attempt to send a lot of values at your methods via it's autogenerated unit tests which may help find odd issues caused by strange/unexpected data.

Upvotes: 1

JaredPar
JaredPar

Reputation: 755357

Is there a tool that will tell you what you're doing wrong?

No. That's part of the fun of programming. It's impossible for a computer program to look at a piece of code and definitively determine what all of the errors are.

Are there tools out there that can tell me some things my program is doing wrong?

Yes, these are called static analysis tools. FxCop is a free tool available from Microsoft that will an amazing amount of static analysis on your code base.

I'm not 100% sure if the standalone version can be pointed at a .sln file. But it can easily be pointed at the build output from a solution.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb429476.aspx

Upvotes: 3

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