What static analysis tools are available for C#?

  • Gendarme is an open source rules based static analyzer (similar to FXCop, but finds a lot of different problems).
  • Clone Detective is a nice plug-in for Visual Studio that finds duplicate code.
  • Also speaking of Mono, I find the act of compiling with the Mono compiler (if your code is platform independent enough to do that, a goal you might want to strive for anyway) finds tons of unreferenced variables and other Warnings that Visual Studio completely misses (even with the warning level set to 4).

Have you seen CAT.NET?

From the blurb -

CAT.NET is a binary code analysis tool that helps identify common variants of certain prevailing vulnerabilities that can give rise to common attack vectors such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL Injection and XPath Injection.

I used an early beta and it did seem to turn up a few things worth looking at.


The tool NDepend is quoted as Quality Metric Tools but it is pretty much also a Code violation detection tool. Disclaimer: I am one of the developers of the tool

With NDepend, one can write Code Rule over LINQ Queries (what we call CQLinq). More than 200 CQLinq code rules are proposed by default. The strength of CQLinq is that it is straightforward to write a code rule, and get immediately results. Facilities are proposed to browse matched code elements. For example:

NDepend static analyzer code rule

Beside that, NDepend comes with many others static analysis like features. These include:

  • Smart Technical Debt Estimation
  • Dependency Graph
  • Dependency Matrix
  • Code Diff capabilities
  • NDepend.API that lets write you own static analysis tool. With NDepend.APi we even developed a tool to detect code duplicate (details in this blog post: An Original Algorithm to Find .NET Code Duplicate).

Code violation detection Tools:

  • FxCop, excellent tool by Microsoft. Check compliance with .NET framework guidelines.

    Edit October 2010: No longer available as a standalone download. It is now included in the Windows SDK and after installation can be found in Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\ [v7.1] \Bin\FXCop\FxCopSetup.exe

    Edit February 2018: This functionality has now been integrated into Visual Studio 2012 and later as Code Analysis

  • Clocksharp, based on code source analysis (to C# 2.0)

  • Mono.Gendarme, similar to FxCop but with an open source licence (based on Mono.Cecil)

  • Smokey, similar to FxCop and Gendarme, based on Mono.Cecil. No longer on development, the main developer works with Gendarme team now.

  • Coverity Prevent™ for C#, commercial product

  • PRQA QA·C#, commercial product

  • PVS-Studio, commercial product

  • CAT.NET, visual studio addin that helps identification of security flaws Edit November 2019: Link is dead.

  • CodeIt.Right

  • Spec#

  • Pex

  • SonarQube, FOSS & Commercial options to support writing cleaner and safer code.

Quality Metric Tools:

  • NDepend, great visual tool. Useful for code metrics, rules, diff, coupling and dependency studies.
  • Nitriq, free, can easily write your own metrics/constraints, nice visualizations. Edit February 2018: download links now dead. Edit June 17, 2019: Links not dead.
  • RSM Squared, based on code source analysis
  • C# Metrics, using a full parse of C#
  • SourceMonitor, an old tool that occasionally gets updates
  • Code Metrics, a Reflector add-in
  • Vil, old tool that doesn't support .NET 2.0. Edit January 2018: Link now dead

Checking Style Tools:

  • StyleCop, Microsoft tool ( run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild project). Also available as an extension for Visual Studio 2015 and C#6.0
  • Agent Smith, code style validation plugin for ReSharper

Duplication Detection:

  • Simian, based on source code. Works with plenty languages.
  • CloneDR, detects parameterized clones only on language boundaries (also handles many languages other than C#)
  • Clone Detective a Visual Studio plugin (which uses ConQAT internally)
  • Atomiq, based on source code, plenty of languages, cool "wheel" visualization

General Refactoring tools

  • ReSharper - Majorly cool C# code analysis and refactoring features

Tags:

C#

Code Analysis

Static Analysis

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