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Who's using this software

Arrabeta
“[SSW Code Auditor] has many qualities I love in products: useful, productive, simple... Great job, Adam.”

MCPmag.com
“SSW Code Auditor makes this much easier for novices by including a wizard to build and test regular expressions for you -- that alone is worth the price of the tool if you're struggling with regex's.”

What about FxCop?

SSW Code Auditor is similar to Microsoft FxCop. FxCop has a good set of rules however there are some issues:

  • Code Auditor has a lot of rules - none of which are in FxCop, eg. the rules listed on our Rules To Better Windows Forms.
  • FxCop works against compiled assemblies only (it uses MSIL to get information about the code). SSW Code Auditor on the other hand looks at the source code itself. This means you can worry about the code formatting and comments.
  • FxCop only works against .NET assemblies. SSW Code Auditor on the other hand works against any plain text files. So now you can write any rules against any files in the solution.
  • Overall FxCop rules are good - however many are obscure (Eg. we do not worry about the Globalization rules, Mobility rules and Portability rules). SSW Code Auditor on the other hand has rules that are more 'general developer' oriented.
  • In addition SSW Code Auditor provides many rules to improve your User Interface.
  • For most users FxCop rules are fixed (unless you want to build a .NET Assembly). SSW Code Auditor rules can easily be extended using regular expressions.
  • Out of the box FxCop only provides one type of report in xml. SSW Code Auditor on the other hand provides a report that is flexible and shows the data in different views.
  • Both can be scheduled via a command line. SSW Code Auditor's wizard makes it real easy to help you keep your code projects clean all the time.
  • SSW Code Auditor includes a VS.NET addin, which encourages you to use both within the VS.NET environment.

Keep your code healthy


Are you looking to eradicate bugs and ensure consistency? SSW Code Auditor is a code analysis tool that allows developers to take control of your code, ensuring large, complex source code can be simplified, cleaned and maintained. The built-in rules focus on the most popular .NET languages (C#, VB.NET) for both Windows Forms and ASP.NET; however, the flexibility of SSW Code Auditor allows the developer to add their own rules to target any language in any text file.

As a project or company grows, managing code standards throughout your team becomes virtually impossible. Consistent code is crucial to future development and maintenance. SSW Code Auditor lets you take control of your code and automatically review your web apps and projects - giving you more opportunity to spend time where it really matters.

Here at SSW, we face the problem of maintaining our standards across nearly five thousand web pages, over twenty active projects in both Visual Basic (6 and .NET) and C#. There comes a point where a tool to check our work is needed, this tool is SSW Code Auditor.

SSW Code Auditor utilizes the power of Regular Expressions to audit your code. This powerful feature permits the user to write their own set of rules and have different rules for different projects.

Key Features & Benefits

SSW Code Auditor allows to you:

  • Verify that coding standards are maintained
  • Prevent bad coding practices
  • Seamlessly integrates with VS.NET

Screen Shot Great, user-friendly wizard style interface With our standards compliant user interface, you are sure to have a consistently great operating environment with SSW products.
Screen Shot Make your own rules! With our powerful regular expression enabled parsing engine, you have the flexibility to scan any text file for any kinds of rules. Rules can check specific filetypes and have exceptions based on other regular expression matches.
Screen Shot Stay on top of things... Code Auditor has in-built scheduling and email notification functionality so you can have regular reminders of what needs attention in your projects!
Screen Shot Spanning the big picture Scan any number of directory trees with extensible path selection. As many development projects can be covered by your rules as you wish.
Screen Shot Report Output See a sample good report from the Code Auditor process.
See a sample bad report from the Code Auditor process.
Screen Shot Visual Studio Add-in Audit your project directly from Visual Studio with just a click.
**Works in Visual Studio 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2010(Testing) **
See the tutorial.
Screen Shot Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Add-in Automatically adds an additional Check-in policy that runs SSW Code Auditor and stops developers from check in code that violates rules.

MS WordCustom check-in policy for VSTS Whitepaper
Built-in sample projects & sample database We offer a sample database and kinds of sample projects to help you run a professional demo scan.

More Technical Features include the ability to:

  • Check any text file
  • Check file names
  • Scan project directories for code that violates your rules
  • Perform deep traversal of directories
  • Scan websites for HTML that violates your rules - including the information served by the web server!
  • Validate HTML code by using the Tidy HTML engine
  • Use the report that is written to an .mdb, or to export to XML
  • Organize separate projects into jobs
  • Allow exceptions to rules, thus ignoring files that you are aware of
  • Full scheduling abilities with email alerts, providing regular automated checks on your code base.
  • Use Regular Expression to define more rules
  • Regular Expression builder included

See more screenshots in the Code Auditor User guide.

Upcoming Features

  • Mike Fourie Happy
  • Paul Usher Happy
  • TFS Check-in policy for VS2008/TFS2008 + VS2010/TFS2010 (not VS2005/TFS2005)
  • Use Telerik Grid (for filtering rules)
  • Auto update rules from our webservice + web page to show version history
  • Upgrade from VS 2008 to VS 2010
  • Use VS Task List (like StyleCop)
  • Easy way to Ignore Rules
  • Change from IE report to a pdf that can be emailed
  • Right click on a project and "Scan with Code Auditor" (auto detect type of project)
  • Document hacks on how you debug stuff in SSW.Framework
  • Review SSW.Framework to see what can be removed
  • Designer UI refresh
  • In VS instantly detect and highlight errors as you code, right in the editor (like Resharper)
  • Take advantage of Multi-core processors on scan (using PLinq)
  • Own web site (like SSW SQL Deploy)
  • Share your rules with others (move down a few)
  • Release 17 - Upgrade to LINQ

System Requirements


Predefined Rules - these are examples of rules you can define

Do they go in Code Auditor or Link Auditor?

The top 5 rules are ...

  1. FONT tags must not be used
  2. - FONT and BASEFONT tags are deprecated by W3C. Ref: w3.org
  3. Google File Size Limit
  4. - Did you know? the search appliance indexes up to 2.5MB of the document, caches it, and discards the rest. Ref: Google Crawler documentation
  5. Table tags should not specify the width
  6. Use Standard width for  Ellipsis button. Look at Do you make common control with certain width? for more details.
  7. Windows Form should have a minimum size to avoid unexpected UI behavior. See Do you keep a minimum size in the window forms? for more details.
  8. More Rules ..

What does the unregistered version give me?

In respect to the unregistered version we know you want to see it working before you buy it. We aim for that.
Note: we also give free version targeted to the little guys
More details see http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/KB/KB.aspx?KBID=Q658302

SSW provides free phone and email support to answer queries on registered products.

How to show that your application is 'SSW Code Auditor' Compliant

Code Auditor Compliat icon To show your users that you have taken the care to create a 'healthy' code, you may display this icon on any web pages and applications that validates.

For web pages:
Here is the HTML you could use to add this icon to your web page:

<p>
    <a href="http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/CodeAuditor">
    <img src="http://www.ssw.com.au/ssw/Images/codeauditorcompliant.gif"
        alt="Code Auditor compliant" height="50" width="148" /></a>
</p>
                

Download the logo in PNG or GIF format.

Where should I put this icon?

We recommend that the logo to be placed on your website footer or in the About Box if it's a winform application.

Getting Support

If you can't find it in the product documentation then check our knowledge base for further information and tips about this product.

If you think that one of our rules is incorrect then please tell us about it.

Please send us bug reports and feedback so that we can evolve our software into a product that matches your requirements. We guarantee a response.

I'm Sold... What's next?