I used previously StyleCop + FxCop on my Visual Studio's projects. But now I am testing Visual Studio Code Analysis tool, which is easier to integrate into MSBuild, and I have found that this tools analyses some of the rules of both FxCop and StyleCop.
Is this tool a full replacement for both FxCop and StyleCop or does it just implement some of their rules?
Until now my googling resulted in the following answer:
http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/07/19/clearing-up-confusion.aspx
states:
"We found that StyleCop is, in fact, a very useful tool and it does things FxCop and TeamDev doesn't do (and it doesn't do the things they do). It is a wonderful complementary tool. StyleCop is a tool for doing coding style checking to verify that source code is formatted the way you want and follows the style guidelines for conventions. While there is some overlap with FxCop (like checking identifier capitalization), the overlap is miniscule as StyleCop does not do the deep analysis that the other static analysis tools do to enable code correctness checks, security checks, etc."
But I'm not sure if the "TeamDev" is the same thing as "Visual Studio's Code Analysis"
My understanding is that Visual Studio Code Analysis is basically a slightly modified version of FxCop. From my experience they are almost the same thing (in fact I believe Code Analysis uses the FxCop executable behind the scenes).
Although there is overlap between FxCop/CodeAnalysis and StyleCop; FxCop tends to focus more on design rules and StyleCop is focusing on coding style (casing, white space, indents, etc).
Also FxCop analyzes the IL while StyleCop analyzes the source code directly. This imposes a different set of restrictions on what rules they can each enforce.
Visual Studio includes FxCop + more.
From the developer blog of FxCop:
A developer blog also gave the exact rules which are in each.
As for StyleCop, it's independent of VS Code Analysis as described in this blog post, which links to Jader Dias' post.