SonarQube Local Analysis in Visual Studio

One of the important expects of SonarQube is to provide developers feedback about their work. Typically this occurs once every night, where a CI system normally runs a full blown analysis. This is certainly the case where the code base is large enough that makes it impossible to run continuously.

We have just identified a problem on this kind of setup, there is clearly waste when feedback is delayed, so there is room to improve the process.

Starting in SonarQube 3.4 a new analysis method as been introduced. It was called dryRun, with this method developers were able to run local analysis using for example the issues report plugin and observe their local improvement (or the other way around) of the complete source code base. Although useful the analysis times and the fact that all source code base was analysed were a bit of a feature killer.

SonarQube 4.0 solved this problem by introducing a new method of analysis called incremental mode (and rename of dry run to preview). With this new version of SonarQube developers are now able to run analysis on their local changes. So much of the noise of the preview mode is now removed. Analyses are now fast and only local changes are analysed.

Taking all this into consideration, there is a remaining issue, presenting information to developer. Although the issues report plugin can be used, a developer needs to exit Visual Studio and so it should not be the preferred method. Developers want all this information available in their source code so they can analyze the raised issues in context.

With the release 1.1 of VSSonarExtension this is now possible. Developers can trigger a incremental analysis from visual studio and the raised issues are highlighted straight in the source code after completion.

Let's take for example one of the C++ projects analyses on Nemo. You will need the SonarQube Cpp plugin and the CppPlugin. Other languages like C# and VB .Net are also available in the same websites.

First let's get sources poco:net to our local disk and unzip the sources. Once this is done, lets navigate to the Net folder and open one of the solutions file with Visual Studio.

First thing to do, is to associate the project with the SonarQube project on Nemo, for this first you need to authenticate against Nemo. So lets go to Tools > Options > Sonar and fill in the authentication details as follow:

Lets bring the issues window, from the Sonar Menu and locate the Project section on the window.

We then locate the poco:net, and click associate. Now our solution is associated and a indication of the association is displayed in the status bar.

One of the important parts of the analysis is making sure our analysis parameters are correct, to do this, we need to go to the plugin properties.

The project properties will be enabled if the association is successful. Here we need to locate for example the sonar runner and java binaries. And mostly making sure the parameters are correct. In our example the parameter sonar.sources needs to be set to src, since the main analysis was configured similarly.

The next step is to go to the Analysis section on the issues panel and choose the Local-Incremental analysis method and trigger the incremental analysis, the status bar will become busy indicating a analysis is running. Once its finished we should observe that the issues have been reported in both the issues window and highlighted in the source code. Nice :).

So to summarize, we this new release of the VSSonarExtension we have improved this developer workflow, now a developer can react straight way and fix the source before committing. Reducing the overall waste, improving source code quality and reducing technical debt.