First published on MSDN on Mar 02, 2007
A bit of a diversion from the normal SQL Server posts. Recently I’ve found a very useful feature in Visual Studio that can help to analyze large amounts of source code – the Visual Studio Code Model objects
Depending on the language of the code base a different set of objects are available to you. In this example I’ve used the VCCodeModel to walk through all the code elements of a C++ project.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using EnvDTE;
using EnvDTE80;
using Microsoft.VisualStudio.VCCodeModel;
namespace CodeModel
{
class CodeWalker
{
static public void WalkCodeElements()
{
//get a reference to the visual studio environment
EnvDTE80.DTE2 dte2;
dte2 = (EnvDTE80.DTE2)System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.
GetActiveObject("VisualStudio.DTE.8.0");
//assume the first project in the solution is the interesting one
Project project = dte2.Solution.Projects.Item(1);
//get the code model for the VC project
VCCodeModel vcCM = ((VCCodeModel)(project.CodeModel));
VCCodeElement vce = null;
if (vcCM != null)
{
for (int i = 1; i < vcCM.CodeElements.Count; i++)
{
vce = ((VCCodeElement)
(vcCM.CodeElements.Item(i)));
printElementInformation(vce, "");
}
}
}
static public void printElementInformation(VCCodeElement el, string level)
{
Console.WriteLine("{0}{1} ({2} references)", level, el.Name, el.References.Count);
//recursively print children
foreach (VCCodeElement child in el.Children)
printElementInformation(child, level + "t");
}
}
}
Given this input:
class ClassA
{
public:
int MyFunction()
{
return 1;
}
}
class ClassB: public class ClassA
{
public:
int MyOtherFunction()
{
return 2;
}
}
class ClassC: public class ClassB
{
public:
int YetAnotherFunction()
{
return 3;
}
}
int main(void)
{
ClassB MyClass;
MyClass.MyOtherFunction();
}
The example generates this output:
main
ClassC
YetAnotherFunction
ClassB
ClassB
MyOtherFunction
ClassA
ClassA
MyFunction
The possibilities are exciting. One could use this object model to graph dependencies, or generate documentation from only source code.
Cheers!
Updated Mar 23, 2019
Version 2.0
Jerome_Halmans
Microsoft
Microsoft