Few days ago I decided to release my CodeWatch library. It’s the first version to show the concept.

Why is this useful

In the .NET world we have a couple of tools for keeping code quality. FxCop, NDepend, R# or SourceMonitor are those most known. In addition we have a number of unit test frameworks like NUnit or xUnit. All of them are really useful when used properly.

Unfortunately due to various reasons there is still a gap. For example:

• Developer running VS Code or other alternative editor like OmniSharp does not have benefits of FxCop or R#.
• It’s hard to keep Coding Convention Guidelines defined for particular project aligned with the code in (sometimes long) development process.
• Addressing all issues found by NDepend or SourceMonitor may become very cumbersome and time consuming.
• Doing code reviews and reporting something that could be automatically reported is a waste of time. Read my post on automation

My intention behind writing CodeWatch was to mitigate and preferably remove the issues above :)

What is it

CodeWatch is a NuGet package meant to keep your code following defined code conventions.

At the moment it can do 3 things:

• Check fields naming (upper or lower case)
• Check properties naming (upper or lower case)
• Check if exceptions are handled in a try/catch block

Sample usage

Here is sample code to demonstrate how the dll works:

    //Our production code
    public class Test
    {
        public int myProp {get;set;}

        public void MyMethodThrowingException()
        {
             try
             {
                 throw new Exception("Error!");
             }
             catch
             {
                 //don't do nothing
             }
        }
    }

    //CodeQuality guard code (in tests dll)
    using NUnit.Framework;

    [TestFixture]
    public class CodeQualityWatcher
    {
        [Test]
        public void CheckThatAllPropertiesAreUppercase()
        {
            PropertyNamingWatcher watcher = new PropertyNamingWatcher();

            //Add types (or assemblies with WatchAssembly) to watch
            watcher.WatchType(typeof(Test));

            //Execute check
            watcher.Execute(); //This will throw exception because we expect Uppercase property names and Test class has myProp
        }

        [Test]
        public void CheckThatAllTryCatchBlockHandleExceptions()
        {
            ExceptionHandlingWatcher watcher = new ExceptionHandlingWatcher();

            //Add types (or assemblies with WatchAssembly) to watch
            watcher.WatchType(typeof(Test));

            //Execute check
            watcher.Execute(); //This will throw exception because we don't handle exception in MyMethodThrowingException method
        }
    }

Sample project is also available here.

How to get it

Here is its NuGet gallery page. All sources are available on GitHub. More to come.