Visual Studio 2012 Features–Code Clone Analysis

If you worked in any maintenance or support project, one of the main challenges is to find out the duplicate code, which makes the system less maintainable. Visual Studio introduced the new Code Clone Analysis feature, which will tell us whether a code snippet exists in any of the files in the solution or not.

Code Clone Analysis

For our sample, I am using the default ASP.Net web application with dummy code copied across the solution.

Select the code snippet and right click.

Select “Find Matching Clones in Solution” option from the Context Menu

You can find the Code Clone Analysis result displayed. From the result window, you can navigate directly to specified code files.

From the results window, you can compare two matching code snippets using the Comparison tool

The output of the Comparison tool

Solution Level Code Clone Analysis

Instead of searching for a particular code snippet, we can perform the Code Clone Analysis on solution level also.

Select the Analyze Solution for Code Clone option from the Analyze Menu.

This will search the entire solution and display all the cloned code details. In our sample, we have 4 matches found. As you can observe from the Code Clone analysis Results window, the analysis results will be displayed depends on the degree of match found and how many files are involved in a particular code clone match.

We have 4 matches with 4 Clone groups – Exact Match, Strong Match, Medium Match and Weak Match.

Expanded view of the Code Clone Analysis results

Conclusion

Visual Studio 2012 introduced many new features to boost the developer productivity. One of the main features is the Code Clone Analysis, which analyze the code and output the duplicate or cloned code snippets information.

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