Visual Lint by Riverblade integrates most popular static C++ code analysis tools with Visual Studio. It supports Gimpel PC-lint, CppCheck, Google cpplint.py and Inspirel Vera++. Visual Lint lets you run these tools from Visual Studio with a single click for a selected file or a solution and displays analysis results in the Visual Studio editor or a tool window:
Visual Lint shows CppCheck analysis results in Visual Studio 2008
After you update and save a file, Visual Lint automatically runs an analysis on it in background and almost immediately shows any violations in the gutter. You can select which issues you want to see by type and by id. A summarizing HTML report is available, but with an established process number of issues should be zero.
Visual Lint doesn’t do any code analysis itself. It passes information about your Visual Studio project to the selected external analysis tool, parses analysis results and displays them in the most convenient way in Visual Studio. One limitation is that Visual Lint can’t run all configured tools at once to cover all kinds of issues; you need to manually switch between CppCheck, cpplint etc:
Analysis tool selection
CppCheck mostly checks correctness of code, PC-lint checks both correctness and style, cpplint and Vera++ verify formatting, helping you conform to your company’s coding standard:
Vera++ formatting analysis results
cpplint formatting analysis results
Particularly for formatting issues, it is very important that all tools allow creation of custom rules, tailoring to your specific needs.
Visual Lint also support C# code analysis via FxCop and Java analysis via FindBugs. All Visual Studio versions from VC 6 to VS 2010 are supported. A single user Standard Edition license costs $199 USD, but most useful features like code editor markers, multiple tools support and issues filters are only available in the Enterprise Edition that costs $799. You can download a 30-day trial version from the official site.
