Compare two fxcop results - fxcop

I'm going to analysis two different versions of the same dll with fxcop.
I would like to display only the differences between these two reports.
Does anyone know if this is possible ?
Thanks for your time.

Yes, it's possible, but there are no built-in tools available for this. One fairly simple approach would be to use a diff tool to compare the two reports. If the result is too noisy for you, another approach would be to roll your own tool to compare the XML of the two reports.

Are you using UI or the command line?
With the command line tool, you have a number of options. One of them is to import an old report to be used as a baseline. Then set the fxcop project to report only new errors: Report Status="Active, Absent" NewOnly="True"
The command line will be something like this: fxcopcmd.exe /i:OldVersionReport.xml /out:NewVersionReport.xml /p:FXCopProject.fxcop /f:mydll.dll
The new report will have only new active error and also a list of missing i.e. fixed errors from the old version.
While this will work for the most part, you need to understand that the difference will not be 100% acurate. FXCop does its best to match old report to the new version of the DLL, but sometimes it fails. For example, if you fixed a particular violation somewhere in code, but added the same type of violation in another place, FXCop will most likely miss this and show no difference.

For FxCop VS 2010 , all you need is to have /saveMessagesToReport:Absent along with the older generated FxCop file /import:"OldFile.xml" specified .
Just an eg.
fxcopcmd.exe /import:"c:\Old.xml" /summary "/file:c:\*.dll"
/saveMessagesToReport:Absent /out:"c:\Output.xml"

Related

Encountered Strange Error: " & ErrorName

New to VisualStudio 2015, but not to programming. Have searched both Google and here for a lead on this, but considering the available search terms, I might not immediately uncover them.
I was looking into porting an old VB6 (200k+ LoC) to VB.Net in VS2015. Mostly just poking around to determine viability. Using a project converter, and have resolved most of the initial errors, and am familiar with how the Error List works.
However, it is throwing a new one at me. It now only has two lines of error, both showing the same thing. They both say:
" & ErrorName
That's a Quote, Ampersand, and ErrorName. That's all that show up on the error list line. No file. No line number. Double click on them does nothing.
I thought perhaps the project was corrupted, so I completely re-created it, adding all the modules, forms, classes, etc again, and it found a lot more errors to fix, which I fixed, and now these two lines show up again.
Does anyone have any indication where this is coming from, or, better yet, how to fix?
I've seen VB programmers report this misbehavior before, never with a good lead to explain the problem. It is specific to VS2015, the Roslyn integration caused many issues. In general a very buggy release, be sure to apply all available Updates, currently up to Update 3. If you have a license that includes an MSDN subscription then I recommend you install VS2012, the last "good" version of VS that was not yet affected by Microsoft's new focus on agile development.
I think the underlying issue is caused by the IDE simply not parsing the compiler error message correctly. Probably having to do with the statement with the error getting quoted in the message. Getting only part of the statement text and it fumbling quotes is a pretty good hint that this is where it went wrong.
So look at the actual output of the compiler, decent odds you'll now see the full error text. Use Tools > Options > Project and Solutions > Build and Run. Change the "MSBuild output build output verbosity" setting to Normal. After the failed build, use View > Output to see the compiler output. You'll probably have a lot of messages, consider copy/pasting the content.

INotifyPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged implemented and not implemented; Visual Studio build error

I'm seeing a strange build bug a lot. Sometimes after typing some code we receive the following build error.
Class 'clsX' must implement 'Event PropertyChanged(sender As Object, e As PropertyChangedEventArgs)' for interface System.ComponentModel.INotifyPropertyChanged'.
And
'PropertyChanged' cannot implement 'PropertyChanged' because there is no matching event on interface 'System.ComponentModel.INotifyPropertyChanged'.
Those error should never go together! Usually we can just ignore the exception and build the solution but often enough this bug stops our build. (this happens a lot using Edit and Continue which is annoying)
We're using Vb.net and c# mixed in one big solution.
Removing the PropertyChanged event and retyping the same code! sometimes fixes this.
Question:
Has anyone else seen this problem and has some suggestions how to prevent his?
We're using a code generator that causes this error to surface but just editing some files manually triggers this exception too. This error occur's on multiple machines using various setups.
Someone had the same exact issue discussed here. It sounds like there is an issue with this build picking up an old version of a binary. I would try the following in order:
Verify all assembly references use project references where possible within the Visual Studio solution.
Disable build parallelization in case there is some weird file locking issue with concurrent project builds. Go to Tools -> Options, Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run, then set "maximum number of parrellel project builds" to 1. Not the best solution but it may help narrow down the problem.
Disable the Hosting Process in case it's locking some file causing an assembly to not get rebuilt correctly. For C# project go to Project Properties, Debug tab, and uncheck "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process". For VB.NET project you'll need to Unload Project, Edit the project file, and add <UseVSHostingProcess>false</UseVSHostingProcess> to the PropertyGroup of each configuration. Again, not the best solution but you probably won't notice a difference.
Lastly, try doing a Clean + Build to try and resolve the issue when it occurs (I know this is not a fix but it's easy enough to do), also Rebuild may be slightly different than Clean + Build so try the latter if the former doesn't work.
As I can not comment due to lack of appropriate points.
But I would like to share one of my experience:
In an aspx.cs page I was working, used to compile fine and some time gave mysterious error of a variable not defined or function not defined or sometime variable or the function defined two times. I changed possibly each and every variable and function name but there seemed no effect , but after entering a simple space or a new line at any place in the file used to solve the compile error. At one time I tried to save the file (in a different encoding as i am used to experiments) and found that the file was not saving in the correct encoding (i.e. the ansi encoding because the file had a unicode character ), I removed the unicode character and that compile error didn't bothered me again.
This unicode character problem could be (not a hard and fast rule) there so you could check it.
Nuke & restore using source control (TFS instructions here):
Make sure you have everything checked in
Exit Visual Studio
Rename the project directory to .Bak (effectively deleting it)
Reopen Visual Studio and in source control:
Get Specific Version
check 'Overwrite... not checked out' and 'Overwrite ... even if local version matches'
Re-open project
Another problem: Make sure some source files are not newer than the current date (or your date is set back). Often this happens in apps where you are doing logic that requires certain things to happen differently on certain dates. You change your clock to test it, make a revision to the source with the date advanced, set the date back, and viola, rebuild does not rebuild that file.
You say 'typing it in again' - can you try just saving? After 40 years since MULTIX the .net build still decides what has changed by checking the file timestamp.
good luck!
When you get the error, is it always on the VB calling C# side, or vice-versa, or does it work both ways?
If the answer is either of the first two situations, try building the "callee" project within the solution before building the "caller" project to see if it stops the situation.
Also, just in case it may jog something for you to think about, does this error crop up when you change a VB file or a C# file, or is there no correllation?
Oh, and sorry this looks like an answer instead of a comment, I cannot post comments yet (need 50 rep).

PC Lint for incremental build - with error from latest code

I am having a CI setup with incremental build. As part of the static checking, I am planning to configure a incremental PC Lint report - This report ignoring all other previous Lint report should provide the errors induced in the new code only. Is there any tool which would do this?
Any hint on the relative area to explore would help us.
I tried report diff'ing. But since the line number would vary from last check-in, would not get the actual incremental error introduced.
I am using Linux for my project build, and using Windows for PC Lint report generation.
Regards,
Wouldn't it be easier to just fix all the reported errors, and have a strict policy against creating new ones? That way you don't need to worry about diffs which by the nature of the problem is going to be hard to impossible.
You could write a script that takes the warnings from lint, removes the line numbers and adds a few lines from the source code around where the warning occurs. Diffing this would show all new lint warnings. One flaw in this, is that it would also show any warnings where source was modified near an existing warning without fixing the warning. On the other hand, this might actually be useful.
Years ago, I saw a utility on BDS Unix that would take your compiler errors and stuff them into your source code as comments. Which might be useful for this exercise. Unfortunately I can't remember what it was called.

Check sql script valid

As part of a release we run a load of PL/SQL scripts against a database. Recently someone left the ; off the end of a line in one script that was called another script so this meant that script did not get run. Because this did not cause an error, it just didn't get run, it took quite a while to track down what had happened.
I want to check the scripts before they are run for lines in them that are missing either a ; at the end or a / on the line after. This is made more complicated as 'lines' in the script could actually span more than one line if it is statement or block of code.
To me this seems like to do this I'm going to have to parse the scripts then check they meet the above.
I've found ANTLR and wonder if this might be a way to do it since there seem to be existing PL/SQL grammars but looks like that's going to be a step learning curve for what's just a simple check.
Does anyone know an easy way or any other tools, eclipse plugins etc that I can use to check for lines in the scripts that are missing either a ; at the end or a / on the line after?
Update
We already do most of the stuff Tom H suggested. The scripts are run into our test server and we have a version table that gets updated at the end. The problem was that the missing semi-colon in the container script meant one script did not get run but the rest including the one to update the version number ran without errors. Therefore the problem only got picked up quite a way into testing. This needed the database restored before running the scripts with the missing semi-colon added so basically resulted in half a day of testing time being lost. If there was a simple way to check this before running the scripts into the test server it could save quite a bit of time.
I agree with MattH that you may be going about this the wrong way. I would just add an insert statement to the end of all of your scripts which insert a "version" row into a table in the database. At the end of your deployment scripts it's then an easy task to check that the version table has all of the correct rows in it.
Also, you should have all of your release scripts being run exactly as they will be in production against your QA server. That's where all of the testing takes place. You never do anything to the server besides what is in your release steps - you only run the release scripts and if those release scripts are ever changed then you refresh the QA server with them and redo testing.
When you go to production your release process has then been fully tested. As a fail safe measure you can also use tools like Red Gate's SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare to check that production matches the QA server. The data compare would only be against certain tables (look-up tables, etc.). If you have data changes to major tables (1M rows, etc.) then you can right a custom script to check that they are correct.
Even if the scripts are different for every release (and not part of a defined source control structure that creates or replaces database objects) I would adopt a practice of breaking the scripts down into the most fundamental units of work per file and deploying them through Ant with the standard sql task. You probably have these types of scripts:
CREATE or REPLACE dbobject...
SQL DML scripts
Anonymous PL/SQL blocks
If you standardize on a consistent statement delimiter (I suggest using "/" since it works with all of the cases above) and set the deployment to fail on error, then Ant will either deploy all of the files or indicate why it couldn't.
I think it would be very difficult to otherwise parse files of one or more SQL and/or PLSQL statements and find missing delimiters if there are no standards on delimiter choice or statements per file.
Just a thought, but are you going about this the wrong way?
I assume, at the file-level, the lack of a semi colon in the file was not a problem? but it only became a problem when run via the batch processing? If that's the case maybe you can change your batch processing to cope with this.
If it was the file, then testing should have picked it up. You don't want to parse your input files to make sure they compile etc.

Print complete control flow through gdb including values of variables

The idea is that given a specific input to the program, somehow I want to automatically step-in through the complete program and dump its control flow along with all the data being used like classes and their variables. Is their a straightforward way to do this? Or can this be done by some scripting over gdb or does it require modification in gdb?
Ok the reason for this question is because of an idea regarding a debugging tool. What it does is this. Given two different inputs to a program, one causing an incorrect output and the other a correct one, it will tell what part of the control flow differ for them.
So What I think will be needed is a complete dump of these 2 control flows going into a diff engine. And if the two inputs are following similar control flows then their diff would (in many cases) give a good idea about why the bug exist.
This can be made into a very engaging tool with many features build on top of this.
Tell us a little more about the environment. dtrace, for example, will do a marvelous job of this in Solaris or Leopard. gprof is another possibility.
A bumpo version of this could be done with yes(1), or expect(1).
If you want to get fancy, GDB can be scripted with Python in some versions.
What you are describing sounds a bit like gdb's "tracepoint debugging".
See gdb's internal help "help tracepoint". You can also see a whitepaper
here: http://sourceware.org/gdb/talks/esc-west-1999/
Unfortunately, this functionality is not currently implemented for
native debugging, but I believe that CodeSourcery is doing some work
on it.
Check this out, unlike Coverity, Fenris is free and widly used..
How to print the next N executed lines automatically in GDB?