When I fired up FxCop 1.36 today, the update check, for probably the first time ever, told me there was a new version available. So I went off to get the update. The odd thing was that I wasn’t pointed towards an installer but a text file. That pointed out that FxCop was now part of the Windows SDK, so installing it is now something of a bigger job than it used to be. In fact, installing the SDK doesn’t install FxCop, it just copies the installer to your machine which then has to be run separately.
But the fact that the version number had increased so much got me excited, thinking there must be lots of improvements… After loading it up and running it against a project, I was a little disappointed. I didn’t spot any new rules and the only difference I noticed was that my custom rules assembly no longer worked.
Updating my rules assembly was pretty simple. First remove the references to the 1.36 assemblies (FxcopSdk.dll and Microsoft.Cci.dll), then update the project to target the .NET Framework 4 (of course this means it has to be built in VS 2010), add references to the version 10 assemblies and rebuild. And it all worked first time. My rules are pretty simple so I don’t know if it will be as easy to upgrade more complex rules assemblies but it all looks pretty good for backwards compatibility.
That said, there doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to upgrade, unless I’ve missed something.
