VS Law .NET Administrator

Flexible Rule Editor

VS Law .NET Administrator is the flexible rule editor used to create and maintain the Visual Basic .NET rules for an organisation, customer or project. Rules created by VS Law .NET Administrator are used by VS Law .NET Workstation users and the VS Law .NET Batch Processor to perform automated code reviews to identify and correct coding violations.

VS Law .NET Administrator makes it easy to write rules to enforce coding standards and design rules. The parser exposes a number of objects whose properties can be interrogated programmatically by rule conditions written using compiled VB.NET.

Rule condition editor used to edit rule condition scripts.

Sample Standards

To get you off to a fast start, VS Law .NET ships with a comprehensive set of VB.NET coding standards (over 220 rules) written by professional Visual Basic programmers and based on the Microsoft .NET Framework design guidelines and industry agreed best practices.

Coding Conventions

Coding conventions in VS Law are rules which attach to parser events. The coding convention rule condition is executed whenever a parser event is raised to which the rule is attached. The scripted rule condition may then interrogate various parser objects and raise a violation if appropriate. Violation description and advice messages may contain parser object property and workfield values.

Keyword Conventions

Keyword conventions attach to parser events but differ from coding conventions in that they do not have scripted conditions but instead use a regular expression to interrogate source code and raise a violation if a match is found.

Naming Conventions

Naming convention rules attach to parser object properties rather than parser events. Simply choose which object (e.g. Class) and property (e.g. Name) to attach a naming rule to and then adjust the prefix, body and suffix rules accordingly.

VS Law permits enforcement of both Microsoft .NET and Hungarian style naming conventions as well as 'home grown' conventions. Support includes different casing options (Camel, Pascal, Upper, Lower and Regular Expression) and allowed characters as well as minimum and maximum lengths. Use of control tags, data type tags and an acronyms list makes it easy to construct naming convention rules to match your way of coding.

Conditional Naming Conventions

Each naming convention rule can impose a condition on the application of the naming convention. The optional rule condition may be used to interrogate parser objects to decide if the specified prefix, body and suffix rules are applicable to the object property depending on the circumstances.

For example, the suffix 'EventArgs' for event argument class names is only appropriate to classes which inherit from the EventArgs class whereas custom exception class names must use the suffix 'Exception'. Rule conditions make such logic very straightforward.

Control Tags

VS Law supports control tags for the naming of controls on forms e.g. 'btn' for Button classes. You can specify a tag to use based on the fully qualified control class name.

Data Type Tags

VS Law Data Tags operate in a similar manner to control tags and are particularly useful when using Hungarian style naming conventions. You can specify a tag to use based on the fully qualified data type name.

VS Law .NET Administrator Key Features

Easily create and maintain Visual Basic law enforcement rules.

Quickly create rules to match those of your organisation, customers and projects. Define rule conditions to trigger violations using compiled Visual Basic .NET. Define categories and group rules by category. Define severity levels and group rule violations by severity. Attach detailed descriptions to violations. Attach detailed advice to violations describing the necessary corrective actions. Embed parser object property values in violation descriptions and advice messages to annotate violations and offer source specific explanations for violations and advice. Embed hyperlinks in violation descriptions and advice messages to external resources. Assign impact weightings to violations. Quickly enable/disable rules. Manage and publish rules centrally to ensure all developers use the latest rules.

Define rules to enforce Visual Basic coding conventions.

Define and attach coding conventions to parser events. Define unauthorised keywords. Enforce code layout and structure. Enforce Windows Form design rules. Enforce project property settings, build configurations and compilation options.

Define rules to enforce Visual Basic naming conventions.

Construct naming conventions using VB.NET script rule conditions, name tags and regular expressions. Attach naming conventions to parser object properties. Define name prefix, suffix and body rules. Define casing rules (Pascal, Camel, Upper, Lower and regular expressions). Easily define and maintain data type name tag values. Easily define and maintain control name tag values. Easily define and maintain allowed acronym values. Fully supports Microsoft .NET naming conventions and Hungarian notation.

Specify review tolerances.

Define default rulebase tolerances to "pass" or "fail" source files during reviews. Specify a maximum allowed cyclomatic complexity value for procedures. Specify a minimum percentage comment source lines per source file. Specify maximum allowed violation count/impact levels by severity or total.

Automatically generate coding standards documentation.

Generate HTML documentation directly from rulebase files. Define rulebase documentation content and sequence. Launch rulebase documentation from within VS Law Workstation.

Professional Visual Basic coding standards.  Free

To get you off to a fast start, VS Law .NET is accompanied by a sample rulebase of over 220 rules forming a comprehensive set of professional VB.NET coding standards. Written by experienced professional Visual Basic developers. Includes a full set of Visual Basic naming conventions. Includes rules based on Microsoft .NET Framework design guidelines and industry agreed best practices.

Download and try VS Law .NET Administrator for free for 30 days.