Teaching FxCop to spell check string literals

Delay's Blog - Speling misteaks make an aplikation look sily [New Delay.FxCop code analysis rule finds spelling errors in a .NET assembly's string literals]

"No matter how polished the appearance of an application, web site, or advertisement is, the presence of even a single spelling error can make it look sloppy and unprofessional. The bad news is that spelling errors are incredibly easy to make - either due to mistyping or because one forgot which of the many, conflicting special cases applies in a particular circumstance. The good news is that technology to detect and correct spelling errors exists and is readily available. By making regular use of a spell-checker, you don't have to be a good speller to look like one. Trust me! ;)

Spell-checking of documents is pretty well covered these days, with all the popular word processors offering automated, interactive assistance. However, spell-checking of code is not quite so far along - even high-end editors like Visual Studio don't tend to offer interactive spell-checking support. Fortunately, it's possible - even easy! - to augment the capabilities of many development tools to integrate spell-checking into the development workflow. There are a few different ways of doing this: one is to incorporate the checking into the editing experience (like this plugin by coworker Mikhail Arkhipov) and another is to do the checking as part of the code analysis workflow (like code analysis rule CA1703: ResourceStringsShouldBeSpelledCorrectly). I'd already been toying with the idea of implementing my own code analysis rules, so I decided to experiment with the latter approach...

...

As you might expect, it's possible to create custom code analysis rules and easily integrate them into your build environment; a great walk-through can be found on the Code Analysis Team Blog. If you still have questions after reading that, this post by Tatham Oddie is also quite good. And once you have an idea what you're doing, this documentation by Jason Kresowaty is a great resource for technical information.

Code analysis is a powerful tool and has a lot of potential for improving the development process. But for now, I'm just going to discuss a single rule I created: DF1000: CheckSpellingOfAllStringLiterals. As its name suggests, this rule checks the spelling of all string literals in an assembly. To be clear, there are other rules that check spelling (including some of the default FxCop/Visual Studio ones), but I didn't see any that checked all the literals, so this seemed like an interesting place to start.

Aside: Programs tend to have a lot of strings and those strings aren't always words (ex: namespace prefixes, regular expressions, etc.). Therefore, this rule will almost certainly report a lot of warnings run for the first time! Be prepared for that - and be ready to spend some time suppressing warnings that don't matter to you. :)

As I typically do, I've published a pre-compiled binary and complete source code, so you can see exactly how CheckSpellingOfAllStringLiterals works (it's quite simple, really, as it uses the existing introspection and spell-checking APIs). I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about how this rule is implemented, but I did want to show how to use it so others can experiment with their own projects.

..."

Not only do we get the bin's but the code too... Love that.