Managed Code Analysis and Code Complexity
One of the coolest features of the
Developer edition of Team System is
integrated code analysis. That's a fancy way of saying that Microsoft has
fully integrated FxCop into the IDE and build process. You can even
establish checkin policies that require code analysis.
To get an idea of what's available on the code analysis "menu", I highly recommend paging through
Microsoft's Code Analysis for Managed Code Warnings on MSDN:
Here's why it's a good idea to read through these at least once. One of the real analysis gems is hidden in there under the
Maintainability category --
rule CA1502: Avoid excessive compexity.
The documentation page for the rule confirms this is
a warning based on cyclomatic complexity, a classic computer science measure of function complexity. Unfortunately, the limits are hard-coded, which is too bad:
| 25 | Warning |
| 50 | Critical Warning |
| 75 | Error |
| 100 | Critical Error |
That's awfully generous, considering that some people consider
anything with a cyclomatic complexity over 40 a complete failure!