Leveraging MSVC's output window

If you use scripts to identify parts of your code that may not meet standards, you can simplify the job of the developer by making use of Visual Studio's Output Window. Any output from a script that appears on a seperate line in the output window with the following format is clickable.

$filepath($line) : $message

When you click on it, the user is taken to the specified file and line and the message will be displayed in the status bar. This is how it works when you let Visual Studio perform builds for you.

So now that you know how to format user messages in the output window, you need to be able to run your script to that output is sent to the output window.

This is pretty easy to do... in Visual Studio, go to: Tools > External Tools and setup you're tool a bit like mine. My example is a perl script that looks for //TODO comments in code and writes the information to the standard output.


The "Use Output Window" is the kicker here. Otherwise it'll run in a separate console window and be less useful to you. When you write your scripts, you should dump the output to the standard output. That is what gets piped into the output window.

With this in mind you can start writing scripts to useful feedback to developer like:

• not consting parameters
• identifying classes / methods without unit tests
• poor coding standards / formatting
  
• implementing FxCop like functionality (for non C# languages)

Basically anything you can identify in a script. I use it for enforcing coding standards, allowing other developers to mark areas for me that could be performance tuned.

It is also useful for doing ASCII to Unicode conversions. Conversions like so are non-trivial and carte-blanche find and replace methods generally don't work. You can write a script to identify potential areas for change and then tackle them one at a time.

Happy Scripting!


note: I don't know how to get it to show up in the Error List window (not that I've looked recently) but if anyone knows, send me a link. That would be super.