My review of Flexisoft's Standards Master 2004

This last week I have been playing around with Flexisoft Solutions Standards Master 2004 quite a bit, so I thought I would put a little review together.

This is my first experience working with a tool that examines source code to check for standards enforcement and overall I am pretty impressed.  The application plugs in to VS.Net and adds its own menu and toolbar to give you access to the application.  It will take care of adding in your comment headers (working with VB.Net on this one) and some other blocks of code if you set it up for that.  The real power is its checking of the source code against the rules that you set up.  With the project I am working on, the standards are a modified version of the Hungarian notation (no its not dead yet).  The naming rules that you can set up are pretty flexible and it does a good job at catching where your code doesn't match the rules.  There are some other items that it catches to (if you configure it to) such as no single like if...then statements, multiple exit points in a routine, etc (see the full list of features)

The service from the company has been excellent, they have been responding to my emails within a couple hours (or so).

Overall I am going to buy it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who needs to make sure their code meets some typical VB standards (I haven't set it up to do any C# checking yet).  I think it would be useful for consultants who do a lot of jumping back and forth between code that has to meet different standards especially, once you get the rules set up you can switch rules files to use real easily.  I also think it would help in a corportae setting where code reviews are better spent looking at the logic and not whether the naming conventions where followed.

posted on Saturday, August 14, 2004 8:03 AM

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# re: My review of Flexisoft's Standards Master 2004

We took a look at Standards Master as well - but then we stumbled onto devAdvantage. They are almost complete with a beta phase of a naming convention feature set (so if you move quickly you can still try it for free). I've been using the beta and it rocks! Its rules are pretty configurable and flexible. It comes configured for Microsoft .NET standards, but can be used for hungarian as well as other notiations.

What I really liked about it was that you can configure it to ignore certain situations. We have some code we downloaded from somewhere else - which doesn;t comply to our standards. I was able to configure it to ignore the entire namspace.

The other cool thing is that can automatically correct the violations one at a time or all at once (and rename accross your entire solution!).

It comes with a bunch of other riles as well and it looks like they are working on exception handling.

You should check it out too
http://www.anticipatingminds.com/content/products/devAdvantage/devAdvantage.aspx

Greg
8/30/2004 1:01 AM | Greg

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