14 DAY TRIAL // Developers building custom SharePoint solutions can now take advantage of a new tool from Microsoft designed to simplify and speed up the review process of their projects.
Dubbed the Microsoft SharePoint Online Code Analysis Framework (MSOCAF), the new application is already live and offered to customers.
Microsoft expects anyone from ISVs to vendors to leverage MSOCAF for reviewing their custom solutions, even before submitting their projects to the software giant.
The promise from the Redmond company is that MSOCAF is perfectly capable of identifying code issues on its own. In this regard, customers can take advantage of the app and resolve any problems before submitting their solutions.
“MSOCAF can also be used to deploy custom solutions to the customer’s test environment or to rollback or remove components of a deployed solution,” Microsoft revealed.
“Previously the submission process was manual and thus time consuming. MSOCAF can communicate with a web service hosted on the customer’s SharePoint environment to submit the deployment package, and submit the custom solution automatically.”
Those that build and want to deploy custom solutions to SharePoint Online will need to grab MSOCAF and use it on their projects. In such scenarios, MSOCAF evaluation is considered mandatory, the Redmond company informed.
Customers will need to have either SharePoint Server 2007 or 2010 already installed for the solution to work.
“MSOCAF analysis executes a set of rules against the custom solutions, prior to submission for deployment approval into the pre-production and production environments,” the software giant said.
“The MSOCAF application is built using an extensible framework so that the SharePoint Online engineering team can add new rules and/or plug-ins in the future.
“Code analysis within MSOCAF focuses on areas like memory management, security vulnerabilities, exception management, object model usage, quality gates for unsupported features and reporting. The framework leverages existing tools like FxCop, CAT.Net, and SPDisposeCheck to analyze custom solutions.”