Too many false positives when using FxCop.

Posted by mark on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by mark
Published on 2010-05-27T08:54:32Z Indexed on 2010/05/27 9:01 UTC
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Dear ladies and sirs.

We are using FxCop and it generates too many false positives to our liking. For instance, if a private method is invoked using reflection, then this method is reported as potentially unused - understandable and we suppress this warning explicitly using the SuppressMessage attribute. However, FxCop reports the same warning for the methods invoked from that method, which we already suppressed warnings about. This is stupid and generates too much noise.

There are also false reports on member variables used in these methods. Also, there are problems with generic types (I even saw something about it in MS connect).

Anyway, I am wondering if anyone knows whether Microsoft is going to upgrade FxCop, because it seems to be stuck in version 1.36 for a long time.

BTW, I we do not use StyleCop, because it is way too picky and we just do not have the time to examine all the zillion messages in order to suppress them all. Besides, the StyleCop report seem to augment, rather than replace FxCop.

Maybe anyone can suggest a good alternative to FxCop?

We are using VS2008 pro.

Thanks.

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