Use FxCop with ASP.NET 2.0

The build process in ASP.NET 2.0 is very different than in ASP.NET 1.x, because it does not produce a dll file. That means that you cannot use FxCop because it can only work with dll and exe file types. However, there is a way to produce dll files from your web application within Visual Studio 2005 and those dll files can be used by FxCop.

These are the steps to follow to make FxCop analyse your web application:

Step 1

Create a new folder somewhere on the disk. It could be C:\deploy

Step 2

Publish the web application into the new folder

Step 3

Open FxCop and add all the dll files from the newly created bin folder (C:\deploy\bin) to be analyzed.

For those of us not using Visual Studio Team System, these are the steps we need to follow to analyse our web applications in FxCop. Let’s hope the next version of Visual Studio have fixed this issue.