Unit testing StyleCop rules
I originally wrote this post back in November 2009 over at my old blog at geekswithblogs.net. Because it still receives some hits, I decided to take it with me and copied it to my new blog. With the exception of some necessary HTML polishing, this article is unchanged compared to its previous version.
The Gallio testing framework (which essentially is MbUnit) that I was using at this time, is no longer available. But it’s very similar to NUnit and you can easily read the code samples if you’re familiar with NUnit. I updated the accompanying sample solution to use NUnit (but not the code excerpts in this post). Also, I updated it to VS 2013 and NuGet and gave it a new home on Github.)
One of the single most influential cost factors for software projects is code readability and understandability – and the most important factor for readability in turn lies in the adherence to Coding Style Guidelines. To enforce such guidelines, Microsoft has provided a free tool which checks a given set of source code files against a given set of style and consistency rules: MS StyleCop. The tool comes with quite a lot of predefined rules – however, they mirror the coding practice at MS and not all of them may be appropriate or sufficient for others. Therefore, StyleCop allows for authoring custom rules to extend or modify the original set of rules. How this can be done, is well covered elsewhere on the web (e.g. here, here, or here).
But in contrary to the rules authoring issue, very little – almost nothing – can be found that deals with testing issues. All I found was this post, which gave me a first insight into the issue and inspired me to write a custom Gallio/MbUnit test fixture that lets you write tests against StyleCop rules as simple as this: