FAQ: Why is FxCop 1.32 not available for download? [David Kean]

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Update:  While SharePoint Portal Server 2003 will not run side-by-side with .NET 2.0, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 SP2 will. For more information, see: https://support.microsoft.com/kb/907763.

We have had a lot of users contacting us since we released FxCop 1.35, asking for a link to be able to download a copy of FxCop 1.32. There appears to be some misconceptions with FxCop 1.35 that we thought we would try to clear up in this post.

Misconception #1: FxCop only analyzes .NET 2.0 assemblies.
Although FxCop 1.35 does require the .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed, it can analyze assemblies compiled against all versions of .NET, including .NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1.

Misconception #2: .NET 1.x and .NET 2.0 cannot be installed on the same system.
Both .NET 1.x and .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2002/2003 and Visual Studio 2005 can be happily run side-by-side on a system without affecting each other. If you do find any bugs with these configurations, then we need to know about it.

Misconception #3: FxCop 1.35 requires Visual Studio 2005.
FxCop 1.35 does not and never has, required any version of Visual Studio to be installed.

There are also a number of other reasons why we have not made FxCop 1.32 available:

  • Bugs. 1.32 is over a year old; since then, there have been 150+ bug fixes, (including all in Visual Studio 2005 Code Analysis), that all made it into 1.35.
  • Security. As part of the bugs fixes, we fixed some of the security rules that were giving completely wrong analysis. Because of this, you do not want to base any security decisions based on the analysis that 1.32 gives.
  • Noise Reduction. For 1.35, we have made significant changes to the amount of noise that FxCop fires against code, including generated and C++/CLI.
  • Support. FxCop is, officially, an unsupported tool, however, individual members of the Code Analysis team spend a significant amount of work (and personal) time in the FxCop forums answering questions. Attempting to support old versions of FxCop means that we spend less time working on newer features and better analysis for our customers.

If the above doesn't convince you to move FxCop 1.35, there are also a number of new features such as 5 new rules, in source suppression and GAC support.