VB Law Workstation 6.2

VB Law Workstation 6.2 offers an intelligent coding standards enforcement add-in for Microsoft Visual Basic 6 source code. Integrating tightly with the Microsoft Visual Basic 6 IDE, it allows the detection and correction of coding standards and other rule violations. It comes supplied with more than 200 professional standard rules that can be easily customized using the separate flexible rule editor VB Law Administrator. This ability to customize rules means that automated code reviews can extend well beyond basic coding standards compliance checking to include detection of known issues (that lead to subtle bugs), detection of sub-optimal code likely to impact performance and detection of dead (unused) code.

VB Law Workstation also reports statistics such as violation counts, line counts (split by type) and code complexity measurements in the form of McCabe Cyclomatic complexity values all of which can assist team leaders and project managers in measuring and monitoring the progress of software developments. Review results are presented directly to the developer within the IDE and c

an be filtered, sorted and grouped as appropriate to focus on issues of concern. Double-clicking any violation selects the offending line of code enabling issues to be quickly located and fixed. VB Law Workstation can identify and report on issues in the following general categories: ActiveX Components, Binary Compatibility, Code Complexity, Code Layout, Comments, Compilation Options, Constant Declarations, Dead Code, Declare Statements, Enum Declarations, Error Handling, File Access, Form Design, Operator Usage, Performance, Procedure Declarations, Project Properties, Source Files, Standard EXE Components, Unauthorised Keywords, User-defined Types, Variable Declarations and the Windows API. With the free specialized VB.NET porting rulebase VB Law Workstation can also be used to identify VB6 to VB.NET porting issues.

Major Features:

1. Automate code reviews within the IDE.
   
   • Perform rapid, frequent, impartial reviews of Visual Basic source code.
   • Review currently open projects within the Visual Basic IDE.
   • Identify and avoid known problems early in the development life cycle.
   • Detect problems relating to known issues with Visual Basic.
   • Determine a "pass" or "fail" verdict for projects based on rulebase tolerances.
2. Enforce Visual Basic coding standards effectively.
   
   • Quickly obtain an accurate measure of coding standards compliance for your Visual Basic source code at any stage of the development life cycle.
   • Enforce coding and naming conventions.
   • Enforce software architecture design goals.
   • Enforce GUI standards.
   • Prevent use of unauthorized keywords.
3. Increase developer productivity.
   
   • Identify and correct coding standards violations without leaving the Visual Basic IDE.
   • Navigate quickly to errant code.
   • Prioritise violation corrections by rule, category, impact or severity.
   • Perform background code reviews whilst editing code.
   • Determine useful source statistics whilst editing code.
4. Reduce learning curves for developers using your organisation's coding standards.
   
   • Achieve a "correct first time" approach to coding.
   • Reduce maintenance and future development costs.
   • Improve readability and understanding of source code by enforcement of consistent coding style and naming conventions.
   • Improve source code quality and maintainability.
   • Target maintenance and testing effort more effectively.
5. Gather and analyze valuable Visual Basic source code statistics.
   
   • Generate summary or detailed project review reports in HTML format.
   • Determine source code member make-up, code-comment ratios and line count statistics.
   • Drill-down by project and source file to procedures.
   • Show levels of improvement, or increased violations in source code over time.
   • Identify "problem" areas of code.
   • List and assess violations by source file, procedure, rule title, severity, category, convention type, impact or frequency.
6. Compute McCabe cyclomatic complexity for Visual Basic source code.
   
7. Compute McCabe cyclomatic complexity metrics for procedures.
   
   • Identify complex areas of code and assess ease of understanding and modification risk.
   • Use complexity metrics to size and target unit testing effort.