VS Law Workstation 1.0

VS Law Workstation 1.0 offers a smart coding standards enforcement add-in for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET source code. Integrating tightly with the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET IDE (2002/2003), it allows the detection and correction of coding standards and other rule violations. It comes supplied with more than 150 professional quality rules that can be easily customised using the separate flexible rule editor VS Law Administrator. This ability to customise 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.

VS 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 can be 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.

VS Law Workstation can identify and report on issues in the following general categories: Arguments, Assembly Information, Attributes, Build Configurations, Class Declarations, Code Complexity, Code Layout, Comments, Constant Declarations, Dead Code, Enum Declarations, Events and Delegates, Exception Handling, Interfaces, Logic Errors, Method Declarations, Namespace Declarations, Project Settings, Property Declarations, Source Files, Structure Declarations, Type Declarations, Unauthorised Keywords, Variable Declarations and Windows Forms Design.

Major Features:

1. Automate code reviews within the IDE.
   
   • Perform rapid, frequent, impartial reviews of Visual Basic .NET source code.
   • Powerful, object-oriented parser analyses source code and compiled assemblies for even the largest projects.
   • Review currently open Visual Basic .NET projects within the Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 IDE.
   • Identify and avoid 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 unauthorised keywords.
3. Increase developer productivity.
   
   • Reduce learning curves for developers new to .NET programming.
   • Obtain best practice advice for .NET programming.
   • Reduce learning curves for use of your organisation's coding standards.
   • Identify and correct coding standards violations without leaving the Visual Studio IDE.
   • Navigate quickly to errant code.
   • Prioritise violation corrections by rule, category, impact or severity.
   • Determine useful source statistics whilst editing code.
   • Achieve a "correct first time" approach to coding.
4. 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 analyse valuable Visual Basic source code statistics.
   
   • 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, rule title, severity, category, convention type, impact or frequency.
6. Compute McCabe cyclomatic complexity for Visual Basic code.
   
   • 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.