Analysis is the process of using Rules to evaluate source code and identify issues that may impact quality, performance or maintainability. devAdvantage can analyze complete solutions or be targeted to analyze an individual project or file. The Rules that are used to analyze source code can be controlled through the use of Profiles. Projects can be configured to use specific Profiles which makes it possible to define a specific collection of Rules to use for a project. To learn more about creating profiles, the Knowledgebase topic.
As with manual code reviews done by experienced developers, code analysis is somewhat of a subjective process leveraging a concept of fuzzy logic to seek out issues. Because of this subjective (or fuzzy) aspect of analysis, some issues (Violations) found during analysis are not always true or serious problems and are therefore categorized based on confidence and severity.
Analysis can only occur successfully of the code is syntactically correct. Any files that do not contain well formed code may be skipped in analysis if the cannot be correctly evaluated. It is therefore efficient to compile and address compiler errors prior to doing an analysis.
NOTE: When analysis occurs it saves files to disk if they are open and have changes to them that have not been saved.
Analyze Solution- To analyze a solution you can go to the devAdvantage menu, Analyze Solution menu item or do the same by opening the Solution Explorer, selecting the solution then right-click for the context menu. Then select the Analyze Solution menu item. When the analysis is executed, it will use the Profiles configured for each project if they are defined or the Profiles defined for the solution if there are not specific project settings. By default, the solution Profile is set to "All Rules". To change either the project or solution Profiles, see Profiles topic .
Analyze only a File or Project - To analyze specific projects or files, you can go to the Visual Studio® solution explorer, select the items you would like to analyze and right-click to get a context menu. From the context menu select the Analyze menu item. When analyzing an individual item, whatever profile that would be used for the project will be used for the item (i.e. the project will use its profile, or the file will use the profile of the project it belongs to). If they file does not belong to a project, it will use the open solution defaults.
Cancel Analysis - When the analysis process is running the progress bar on the bottom of Visual Studio .NET will indicate what is occurring. The Analysis process can be canceled at any time by selecting the devAdvantage menu, Cancel menu item..