A new vNext task to run StyleCop

Update 6 Feb 2016 - I have made some major changes to this task to expose more parameters, have a look at this post that details the newer version

Today a good way to pull together all your measures of code quality is to run SonarQube within your automated build; in a .NET world this can show changes in quality over time for tools such as FxCop (Code Analysis) and StyleCop. However sometime you might just want to run one of these tools alone as part of your automated build. For Code Analysis this is easy, it is built into Visual Studio just set it as a property on the project. For StyleCop it is a bit more awkward as StyleCop was not designed to be run from the command line.

To get around this limitation I wrote a command line wrapper that could be used within a build process, see my blog post for details of how this could be used with vNext build.

Well that was all best part of a year ago. Now I have more experience with vNext build it seems wrong to use just a PowerShell script when I could create a build task that also deploys StyleCop. I have eventually got around to writing the task which you can find in my vNextBuild repo.

Once the task is uploaded to your TFS for VSTS instance, the StyleCop task can be added into any build process. The task picks up the file locations from the build environment variables and then hunts for StyleCop settings files (as detailed in my previous post). The only argument that needs to be set is whether the buidl should fail if there are violations

Once this is all setup the build can be run and the violations will be shown in the build report, whether the build fails or passes is down to how you set the flag for the handling of violations

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