Question

What tools are there available for static analysis against C# code? I know about FxCop and StyleCop. Are there others? I’ve run across NStatic before but it’s been in development for what seems like forever – it’s looking pretty slick from what little I’ve seen of it, so it would be nice if it would ever see the light of day.

Along these same lines (this is primarily my interest for static analysis), tools for testing code for multithreading issues (deadlocks, race conditions, etc.) also seem a bit scarce. Typemock Racer just popped up so I’ll be looking at that. Anything beyond this?

Real-life opinions about tools you’ve used are appreciated.

Answer 1

Code violation detection Tools:

• FxCop, excellent tool by Microsoft. Check compliance with .NET framework guidelines.

  Edit October 2010: No longer available as a standalone download. It is now included in the Windows SDK and after installation can be found in Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\ [v7.1] \Bin\FXCop\FxCopSetup.exe

  Edit February 2018: This functionality has now been integrated into Visual Studio 2012 and later as Code Analysis

• Clocksharp, based on code source analysis (to C# 2.0)

• Mono.Gendarme, similar to FxCop but with an open source licence (based on Mono.Cecil)

• Smokey, similar to FxCop and Gendarme, based on Mono.Cecil. No longer on development, the main developer works with Gendarme team now.

• Coverity Prevent™ for C#, commercial product

• PRQA QA·C#, commercial product

• PVS-Studio, commercial product

• CAT.NET, visual studio addin that helps identification of security flaws Edit November 2019: Link is dead.

• CodeIt.Right

• Spec#

• Pex

• SonarQube, FOSS & Commercial options to support writing cleaner and safer code.

Quality Metric Tools:

• NDepend, great visual tool. Useful for code metrics, rules, diff, coupling and dependency studies.
• Nitriq, free, can easily write your own metrics/constraints, nice visualizations. Edit February 2018: download links now dead. Edit June 17, 2019: Links not dead.
• RSM Squared, based on code source analysis
• C# Metrics, using a full parse of C#
• SourceMonitor, an old tool that occasionally gets updates
• Code Metrics, a Reflector add-in
• Vil, old tool that doesn’t support .NET 2.0. Edit January 2018: Link now dead

Checking Style Tools:

• StyleCop, Microsoft tool ( run from inside of Visual Studio or integrated into an MSBuild project). Also available as an extension for Visual Studio 2015 and C#6.0
• Agent Smith, code style validation plugin for ReSharper

Duplication Detection:

• Simian, based on source code. Works with plenty languages.
• CloneDR, detects parameterized clones only on language boundaries (also handles many languages other than C#)
• Clone Detective a Visual Studio plugin (which uses ConQAT internally)
• Atomiq, based on source code, plenty of languages, cool "wheel" visualization

General Refactoring tools

• ReSharper – Majorly cool C# code analysis and refactoring features