Published: Oct 11, 2020 by

For a while now I’ve been interested in build tools, CI and code quality. I think I got a taste for it as a member of the PyMSSQL project and it has continued on from there. Recently I worked on the initial CI setup for a C# project. As part of the setup I took the time to look at what lint and analysis tools we wanted to integrate into our project.

For C# some of the more common tools appear to be:

  • Roslyn Analyzers
  • Sonarsource
  • NDepend

  • Jetbrains Resharper I won’t go into the full criteria for our choice of Resharper (I’ll update this post if I end up writing that up one day), instead I’ll summarize that Resharper provided:

  • easy cross platform setup
  • ide/editor and shell agnostic
  • works the same locally and in CI.
  • opinionated by default

    Resharper Command Line Tools

From the docs

ReSharper Command Line Tools is a set of free cross-platform standalone tools
that help you integrate automatic code quality procedures into your CI, version
control, or any other server.You can also run coverage analysis from the command line.The Command Line Tools package includes the following tools:- InspectCode, which executes hundreds of ReSharper code inspections

  • dupFinder, which detects duplicated code in the whole solution or narrower
    scope
  • CleanupCode, which instantly eliminates code style violations and ensures a
    uniform code base### Install

To get started with Resharper tools (assuming you already have .NET Core installed) run

cd <project>
dotnet new tool-manifest
dotnet tool install JetBrains.ReSharper.GlobalTools --version 2020.2.4Which installs the [Resharper Global Tools](https://www.nuget.org/packages/JetBrains.ReSharper.GlobalTools/2020.2.4) at the project level. This then allows CI and other contributors to use dotnet tool restore in the future.

Configuration

Out of the box inspect, format, and dupefinder all have default configurations that work well. That said each team has their own needs and preferences you may want these tools to promote. While there are a few ways to configure these tools I found using editorconfig to be the most human readable approach.

For additional details on the editorconfig format see the docs and this property index.

Running

Running the tools from a shell is relatively easy:

jb cleanupcode --verbosity=ERROR --config=./.config/cleanup --settings=./.editorconfig --no-buildin-settings ./Project.sln
jb inspectcode --verbosity=ERROR Project.sln -o=./reports/resharperInspect.xml
jb dupfinder --verbosity=ERROR Project..sln -o=./reports/resharperDupFinder.xmlOne thing to note is that by default the autoformatting will attempt to enforce line endings. If you have a team working across multiple platforms and using git to automatically handle line endings these can come into conflict. It's up to you and your team to decide if you want to handle this by tweaking git behavior,editorconfig or another method.

CI

If your using Team City see **this* doc for details.*

With everything running in our shell locally we can also set things up to run in our CI pipeline. Running the tools is easy as long as your CI platform has a shell like task/step/operator:

- script: |  
  dotnet tool restore  
  jb cleanupcode --verbosity=ERROR --config=./.config/cleanup --settings=./.editorconfig --no-buildin-settings ./Project.sln  
  jb inspectcode --verbosity=ERROR Project.sln -o=./reports/resharperInspect.xml  
  jb dupfinder --verbosity=ERROR Project..sln -o=./reports/resharperDupFinder.xml  
  displayName: 'Resharper'

Of course you will probably break these up for easier maintenance and reporting.

Running the tools is easy. The trick is detecting when these tools find an issue. I’ll share what I did in case it’s helpful, but long term it would be great if Jetbrains had the tools exit with documented status codes for different issues. As it stands the tools only exit with an error if the tool fails, not when issues are reported.

CleanupCode

Since CleanupCode will format our file rewriting it on disk we can use git to detect the change.

formatted=$(git status --porcelain=v1 2>/dev/null | wc -l)  
exit $formatted

dupFinder

dupFinder outputs an XML file highlighting any issues found. Powershell’s built in XML support makes it easy enough to query this file and see if any issues exist.

$Result = Select-Xml -Path $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/reports/resharperDupFinder.xml -XPath "/DuplicatesReport/Duplicates/*"
If ($Result -eq $null) { [Environment]::Exit(0) } Else { [Environment]::Exit(1) }### InspectCode

Similar to dupFinder InspectCode documents issues with an XML file, and once again we can use Powershell to detect if there are any issues to fix.

$Result = Select-Xml -Path $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/reports/resharperInspect.xml -XPath "/Report/Issues/Project/*"
If ($Result -eq $null) { [Environment]::Exit(0) } Else { [Environment]::Exit(1) }And since dupFinder and InspectCode output XML it can be useful to save these as CI artifacts for review. In Azure Pipelines this looks like:

- task: PublishPipelineArtifact@1  
  inputs:  
  targetPath: '$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/reports/'  
  artifactName: 'measurements'  
  condition: always()  
  displayName: 'Save ReSharper Results For Review.'### Wrapping Up

We’ve been using the ReSharper tools for a few months now and I have to say they provided what I was looking for in the beginning. The tools have been easy to use, help us maintain our code and haven’t boxed us in or required a lot of extra time on configuration and unseen gotchas. The only criticism I have is cold start time is pretty slow for cleanupcode, and the return exit codes could be better. Both of these would also help with CI, and our git hook setup. Otherwise I think these will continue to serve us well and let us focus on our project delivery.

C#, tools, programming