Migrating custom Code Analysis rules to VS2012

Question

I have written dozens of custom code analysis rules. The rules were developed targeting Visual Studio 2010. As required, the assembly has a reference to version 10.0 of FxCopSdk, Microsoft.Cci, and Microsoft.VisualStudio.CodeAnalysis. They run correctly in Visual Studio 2010 and build properly in TFS 2010.

I'd like to migrate to Visual Studio 2012. When I run the custom rules on an existing solution using VS 2012, however, I get CA0062 errors. The root cause is a CA0053 error loading the custom rules assembly. I understand that these references to the three assemblies need to be updated to version 11 for Visual Studio 2012. This can be done using version redirects in config files. I can get this to work locally by redirecting the Visual Studio 2012 IDE and FxCopCmd binaries, but am running into trouble when checking code into TFS 2010.

There are two apparent solutions we have considered, but neither is very palatable. The first is to require each developer to redirect locally, and then modify the TFS build agents to redirect as well. The second is to maintain two branches of the custom code analysis rules, one targeting version 10 (VS2010) and the other targeting version 11 (VS2012).

Is there a better way to do this, or do we need to all upgrade to TFS 2012 and Visual Studio 2012 simultaneously?

I think those are your three options :( – MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood Jan 02 '13 at 01:00 — MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood, Jan 02 '13 at 01:00

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 05 '13 at 13:21

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You can try to manually edit the project file and write two include blocks (one for VS2010 and one for VS2012), then define conditions to use the correct one. You only have to somehow determine if You want to build for VS2010 or VS2012 in msbuild.

answered Feb 05 '13 at 13:21

ZFE

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 05 '13 at 14:04

Between your approaches and the one proposed by ZFE, you pretty much have all the potential candidates. Given the choices, I would strongly recommend branching since there is no official SDK for FxCop with backward-compatibility guarantees.

If you're lucky, you won't hit any behavioural or API surface changes that affect your rules, and the only difference between your two branches will be the references, so any merges will be trivial. However, any time investment you make in an alternate approach now will be lost if you need to branch later, and the likelihood of eventually needing to branch is non-negligeable.

Migrating custom Code Analysis rules to VS2012

2 Answers2