Validate StyleCop in TeamCity

Question

I'm trying to get TeamCity to build my C# solution and execute StyleCop and fail the build if there are any violations. I want it to execute the same as when you right click the solution in Solution Explorer in Visual Studio and then click Run StyleCop except that I would like the warnings to be treated as errors.

I've tried the suggestions in this answer, however I've had a few problems implementing it.

The problems were:

<CreateItem Include="$(SourceFolder)\**\*.cs">

was including all .cs files in the folder structure and not respecting the individual StyleCop settings for each project (e.g. files to exclude).

Another option would be to have a build.xml file so that it can be referenced by MSBuild. However this would mean maintaining the XML file as well as the .sln file. I did find this answer which meant you could include the solution reference in the XML like so

  <include name="MyTopSecretApplication.sln"/>

but for some reason it wasn't passing the compiled files when I had my CreateItem set as

<CreateItem Include="@(Compile)">

which should in theory pass the compiled files in and respect include/exclude settings if condition was set (as per the below) (I'm guessing because the XML file including the .sln meant the compiled files weren't passed).

Condition="('%(Compile.ExcludeFromStyleCop)' != 'true') and ('%(Compile.ExcludeFromSourceAnalysis)' != 'true')"

Is there a good way I can get MSBuild to build my solution file in TeamCity, validate that StyleCop rules are followed, and respect the StyleCop rules per project?

Answer 1

So here's how I get this to work in my environment

• Get StyleCop working the way you want to on your dev machine using Visual Studio. I do this using the NuGet package but so long as you are getting build warnings when there are StyleCop issues then you're good.
• To turn the StyleCop warnings into errors edit each csproj file and include create a StyleCopTreatErrorsAsWarnings element with a value of false in the relevant build configuration section, for example I only do this for Release builds. See this blog for more detail on this.
• Just get TeamCity to build your solution and as the StyleCop warnings are now errors it will fail the build if there are any StyleCop issues.