TIP: Get more information about a rule/warning within Visual Studio [David Kean]

Did you know you can get more information about a particular rule/warning within Visual Studio; including its description, information on how to fix it, whether or not it is considered a breaking change, when or when not to suppress it and code samples?

To do this for a particular warning in the Error List:

  1. Right-click the warning and choose Show Error Help

                           -or-

  1. Select the warning and press F1

To do this for a particular rule:

  1. In Solution Explorer, right-click your project and choose Properties
  2. In the Project Properties window, choose the Code Analysis tab
  3. Expand one of the category nodes, select a rule node and press F1

This information is updated regularly, so you can make sure the Help viewer always displays the most update-to-date information by changing it so that it tries the online MSDN Library version before the local:

  1. Choose Tools -> Options
  2. In the Options dialog, expand to and select the Environment -> Help -> Online node
  3. Under When loading Help content, choose Try online first, then local and click OK