Like many architects, I've developed coding standards through years of experience to which I expect my developers to adhere.

This is especially a problem with the crowd that believes that three or four years of experience makes you a senior-level developer.Approaching this as a training and code review issue has generated limited success.

So, I was thinking that it would be great to be able to add custom compile-time errors to the build process to more strictly enforce this and other guidelines.

For instance, we use stored procedures for ALL database access, which provides procedure-level security, db encapsulation (table structure is hidden from the app), and other benefits. (Note: I am not interested in starting a debate about this.) Some developers prefer inline SQL or parametrized queries, and that's fine - on their own time and own projects.

I'd like a way to add a compilation check that finds, say, anything that looks like

string sql = "insert into some_table (col1,col2) values (@col1, @col2);"

and generates an error or, in certain circumstances, a warning, with a message like

Inline SQL and parametrized queries are not permitted.

Or, if they use the var keyword

var x = new MyClass();

Variable definitions must be explicitly typed.

Do Visual Studio and MSBuild provide a way to add this functionality? I'm thinking that I could use a regular expression to find unacceptable code and generate the correct error, but I'm not sure what, from a performance standpoint, is the best way to to integrate this into the build process.

We could add a pre- or post-build step to run a custom EXE, but how can I return line- and file-specifc errors? Also, I'd like this to run after compilation of each file, rather than post-link.

Is a regex the best way to perform this type of pattern matching, or should I go crazy and run the code through a C# parser, which would allow node-level validation via the parse tree?

I'd appreciate suggestions and tales of prior experience.