David DeWinter

If you’re not familiar with the code analysis rule mentioned in the title of this post, I recommend you check out David Kean’s FAQ post here for some background.

In summary, a violation of this rule may be fired even if you declare a read-only variable of a type that’s immutable, because the code analysis engine won’t know that that type is immutable. To get around this, you can follow David’s suggestion of putting an ImmutableTypes.txt file in the same directory as your FxCop project file.

But if you’re using Visual Studio Team System to execute your Code Analysis, it’s a different story because you don’t have an FxCop project file. Fortunately, this ImmutableTypes.txt file can be placed in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9\Team Tools\Static Analysis Tools\FxCop\ImmutableTypes.txt location to be picked up.

What would be great is if there was an MSBuild task that allowed developers on a project to make an ImmutableTypes.txt file directly in a VS project and have that merged with the existing ImmutableTypes.txt at the target location. That way, individual projects can build their ImmutableTypes without worrying about CA2104 violations. In fact…I may just build that task. Right now I have a centralized project for gathering Immutable Types and I do this as part of my build:

<Copy SourceFiles=“ImmutableTypes.txt“ DestinationFolder=“$(VS90COMNTOOLS)..\..\Team Tools\Static Analysis Tools\FxCop\“ />

That will copy the ImmutableTypes.txt file from my project to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9\Team Tools\Static Analysis Tools\FxCop\ImmutableTypes.txt location. Problem (tentatively) solved.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 2:26 pm and is filed under Code Analysis, Visual Studio Team Suite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.