However in this instance I’m working with a large legacy codebase. Even with the best intentions people won’t stick to a convention unless it gets enforced, and based on the amount of code that doesn’t comply it isn’t very simple to start enforcing the standard.

The only solution I could really see was to swallow the pain and go and reformat all of the existing code, then start enforcing analysis on the projects that have been updated.

I don’t think this would have even been possible if it hadn’t been for Resharper 5 and the StyleCop for Resharper plugin. I’ve become massively more productive since using Resharper a few weeks back and in this instance it’s been simply awesome.

Code Cleanup

Once Resharper has been configured with the StyleCop plugin so all coding style conventions are set up, you can run the code cleanup feature against a file or folder (Ctrl-Shift-Alt-F) which will reformat all existing code based on the configured rules. In my case this will typically reduce a file from around 300 violations to about 8. You can set up a profile to control exactly what does or does not get changed as part of this process.

Cycle through code issues (F12)

The next most useful feature is that StyleCop violations are treated as code issues by ReSharper. Hitting F12 repeatedly within a code file will jump to the next issue making it very simple to navigate around all violations and clean them up.

Violation highlighting within editor

The plugin will also highlight any style violation as you code, and provide tooltips and messages in the status bar to indicate what the violation was.

It will still take a while to finish updating the existing codebase, but I’m not even sure it would be feasible to attempt this without these tools.

I’ve just installed Vista, and initially ran into a few problems getting the build script to run sucessfully. IIS7 isn’t installed by default in Vista, so you need to go to Programs and Features manually and choose to install. When you do this, make sure you expand the IIS node in the treeview and check all of the features you require. By default the web server will install with a very limited range of features. The important one here is under II6 Management Compatability > IIS Metabase and II6 configuration compatibility.

If you’re using the SBF task library for msbuild, the tasks for configuration of IIS use the WMI interface for configuring the webserver. This will continue to work so long as the previous configuration is checked when installing IIS7.

The next problem you’ll face is to do with elevated permissions. When you carry out IIS configuration via the user interface, you’ll be prompted to elevate to admin permissions (the annoying dialog that pops up frequently). If you’re running a scripted build, this doesn’t occur so you’ll get an Access Denied exception when msbuild calls the IIS configuration tasks. Set up a shortcut for the command prompt (or use the VS.NET command prompt shortcut), right click on it, and choose “Run as Administrator”. This means that tasks which require administrative priveleges (but can’t ask for them via the UI) will complete successfully.

IIS7 comes with a command line utility which allows you to do things like create websites or virtual directories. Long term it may be simpler if the msbuild tasks shell out to this utility rather than using WMI, but for the time being they would need to be able to configure IIS6 and 7, so WMI is the best approach.