Kernel Mustard

I’ve blogged before about how much I like Visual C++ Express Edition, but it does lack one feature that I consider to be extremely important: code analysis using /analyze (i.e. PREfast). I pointed this out a while ago, and Michael Howard responded a couple of days later that the Vista PSDK compilers do support /analyze.

I finally got around to testing this theory out recently, and it works like a charm. With a little bit of one-time work, you can set this up for all of your projects. Here’s how:

1. Get the latest Vista Platform SDK. This is available to beta testers via Connect and also via various other locations. Apparently this has been a part of the Vista SDK for a while, so even an older version should work, although I just tested with RC2 this weekend.
2. Create a new configuration for your project in the IDE. I named mine Analyze. I copied all of my settings from the Debug configuration.
3. Open up the property manager for the Analyze configuration and find the C++ command line section. Add /analyze to the command line. If you want to not count PREfast warnings as errors, you can also add /analyze:WX- in addition to /analyze. WX needs to be capitalized.
4. Set the executable path using Tools->Options. Simply registering the SDK with Visual Studio is not enough – you have to actually manually add the compiler-specific BIN, LIB, and INCLUDE directories under the VC subdirectory of the PSDK.
5. Finally, I had to change my system’s PATH environment variable to get Visual Studio to actually invoke the PDSK’s build tools in preference to its own.

I was able to get it working using both the IDE and vcbuild.exe by following this procedure. Compiling with /analyze takes a lot more time, and I’ve found that the PSDK headers aren’t actually quite PREfast-clean yet in a few places. There are also some bogus warnings about various APIs that return valid data lengths (i.e. recv()), but I had no trouble suppressing them with one-line warning suppression statements.

Using PREfast takes some getting used to, but in the end, I find it to be worthwhile. Oh, and incidentally, you can also get other features left out of Express Edition this way, like x64 compilers. Happy coding!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 8th, 2006 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Programming, Security, Vista, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.