FxCop / Code Analysis with VS2010 Ultimate

Question

I have information about this, but I can still find the correct answer. I was recently asked at my company: "Run an fxcop analysis on this code and tell me the results."

Ok, I have a VS2010 Ultimate that has code analysis, but before I make any comments, I browse it on the Internet because I want to implement a better choice ...

So, let's say I will use the same rules for both analyzers:

• Should I recommend using one over the other?
• Should I say "hey it's just old, let me use code analysis!"
• Should I get the same results on different computers? (for what I am undersand, fxcop gives you “points” and for what I read, sometimes it gives you scatter points on computers with different levels, I don’t know about this with code analysis.

Thanks, any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

FxCop and code analysis are essentially the same, with the following differences:

• Code analysis includes the VS IDE extension. FxCop can run and show results in the IDE, but the result is not so full-featured. FxCop, on the other hand, includes a standalone interface that is more fully functional for certain types of research results.
• Code analysis contains more rules than FxCop. This is partly due to the fact that it includes a mechanism of additional rules, but part of it is simply additional rules that Microsoft decided to pay us. (Additional rules can be run from FxCop if you want to see the results in the standalone FxCop interface.)

For any given rule, you should see exactly the same results on any given machine, regardless of which of the two tools you use. The only cases in which you should see differences are when you do not specify culture settings for the FxCop analysis, and the system culture differs between machines.