FxCop Polices Components

The ability to reuse components across programming languages is one of the key benefits of the .NET Framework. Microsoft’s FxCop helps developers follow guidelines for building reusable components and ensuring maximum compatibility across languages.

Although the .NET Framework provides a common base technology, programmers must still take into account differences among programming languages to build components that can be effectively used in any of its supported languages, such as C# and Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET). To help developers build reusable components, Microsoft publishes the .NET Framework Design Guidelines, a document that lays out rules for cross-language compatibility, and a tool called FxCop that analyzes compiled code for compliance with these rules. Because it works by examining compiled code rather than the actual source code, FxCop can be used with any .NET programming language. For an illustration of FxCop at work, see “FxCop Identifies Common Errors“.

FxCop identifies several types of potential problems, including the following: