PVS-Studio for Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2013

Feb 09 2015

Author: Andrey Karpov

The Microsoft company has released another software product - a new, free Visual Studio version whose only limitation is a prohibition of corporate software development.

So how does this affect our product - PVS-Studio?

Visual Studio Community 2013 is a new, free edition allowing developers to create solutions for multiple platforms and scripts, including web, clouds, desktop computers, and mobile devices.

There are two basic differences between Visual Studio Community Edition and Express Editions:

Visual Studio Express editions do not allow using plugins. There are over 5000 wonderful plugins for Visual Studio in Visual Studio Gallery which can make developers' work more effective, but they are not available for Visual Studio Express users.
Visual Studio Express editions are oriented to particular platforms: Express for Web; Express for Windows; Express for Windows Desktop... But with Visual Studio Community Edition, you can now develop cross-platform projects.

Obviously, what is important for PVS-Studio is that the new version allows installing plugins and extensions. Being a full-fledged product with almost the same features as offered by the commercial Visual Studio 2013 Professional version, the free Visual Studio edition appears to be an attractive IDE for development of large applications where static analysis becomes of high importance for controlling the code quality.

I guess this step is aimed to extend the community of Microsoft-platform software developers by providing a full-fledged IDE to startups, small companies, single developers, open-source developers communities, and students.

To test how smoothly PVS-Studio integrates into the new version and how well plugins for Visual Studio 2013 work in Visual Studio Community 2013, we analyzed a few projects.

Media Player Classic Home Cinema, an open-source media-player for Windows. This project didn't give us enough material to write an article, especially if taken into account that it is regularly checked by Coverity.
LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite. The analysis results will be reported in an article coming soon.
A candidate for a check is CoreCLR - a key component of .NET Core performing various functions such as garbage collection and compilation to machine code.