StyleCop and FxCop integration in VS 2008 Express

Recently I took interest in improving the quality of the applications I write by forcing them to be checked by StyleCop and FxCop during the build.

StyleCop was really easy to implement - just one line, well documented, nothing one would struggle with:

1. Install StyleCop using MSI installer
2. Add the following line to your project right after the line that imports C# tasks (by default it's nearly at the end of the project file!):

<Import Project="$(ProgramFiles)\MSBuild\Microsoft\StyleCop\v4.3\Microsoft.StyleCop.targets" />

FxCop on the other hand wasn't so easy to find out but it was just as easy to manage:

1. Install FxCop using MSI installer
2. Add the following task to <AfterBuild> target:

<Exec Command='"$(ProgramFiles)\Microsoft FxCop 1.36\FxCopCmd.exe" /file:"$(TargetPath)" /console'/>

That's it. Alternatively you could just add a post-build event using project options editor. This event would then look like that:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft FxCop 1.36\FxCopCmd.exe" /file:"$(TargetPath)" /console

Pretty easy, ain't it?

Here you have a ready-to-check example of the above.

FxCop+StyleCop-example.zip

Enjoy!