SubMain’s CodeIt.Right and CruiseControl.NET

A New Tool

I’m always on the look out for developer tools that can help my development. And if the tools can be integrated with CruiseControl.NET – even better!

Recently I found another static code analysis tool – but one with a difference. The tool is called CodeIt.Right by SubMain (http://submain.com/products/codeit.right.aspx). This performs a static analysis for C# and VB.NET code. The difference is it also offers automatic refactoring – it can fix the problems that it finds!

I got in touch with SubMain and they were happy for me to integrate it with CruiseControl.NET. So, I have put together an integration package to include it.

The Task

As well as integration with the IDE, CodeIt.Right comes with a command line version. This tool goes through and analyses the code and produces an XML report out the other side. So it was a simple matter to add a new task that calls the command-line version.

Rather than stopping there, I’ve tried to add a bit of extra value. First, the task will automatically merge the XML results file. Since this is integrated into the task itself, it will only merge the file if the task is run. I mention this because it is often an issue with the merge task – if it is put in the publishers section it will always merge the file, whether or not the task that is supposed to generate it ran or not.

Second, After the analysis has finished, the task can be configured to scan the results file and fail if any violations over a severity level have occurred.

To call the task is as simple as:

<codeItRight>
  <project>remote.csproj</project>
  <executable>Tools\SubMain\CodeIt.Right\SubMain.CodeItRight.Cmd</executable>
</codeItRight>

Where <project> is the project to analyse (you can also use <solution> for scanning an entire solution) and <executable> is the location of the command line executable. A more complete example is:

<codeItRight>
  <solution>ccnet.sln</solution>
  <executable>Tools\CodeIt.Right\SubMain.CodeItRight.Cmd</executable>
  <crData>ccnet.crdata</crData>
  <failureThreshold>Error</failureThreshold>
  <profile>FullScan</profile>
  <reportingThreshold>Warning</reportingThreshold>
  <timeout>600</timeout>
</codeItRight>

Dashboard Integration

The second part of this integration is to add a dashboard plug-in. Since the report is in XML, it is a simple matter to convert it to a report.

CodeIt.Right already comes with an XSL-T template to generate a report, but since it is part of the product, I wasn’t able to include it in CruiseControl.NET. Instead I have produced a different report. Initially I tried to duplicate the CodeIt.Right report, but my XSL-T skills weren’t up to the challenge So, instead I have produced a CruiseControl.NET specific report.

This report is similar to the main project grid – it displays all the results in a sortable grid:

Additionally, the results can be filtered, thus reducing the “noise” in the report.

I also added a summary report, which is included on the main build report:

Finally, to round everything off I built a dashboard deployment package, so adding the new reports is as simple as going to the admin console and installing it.

In Conclusion

This was a fairly easy tool to integrate into CruiseControl.NET. The task simply runs the tool and merges the result, with the added benefit of checking the results to fail the build if necessary. The reports were just some simple XSL-T templates, plus a package to make it easy to install!