Develop Reference

Dictionary of Words in SonarQube

We introduced SonarQube into our project which is working fine, but we have names like SelfAHFController. For Sonar, the name SelfAHFController should be SelfAhfController.
In StyleCop was possible to create a dictionary of allowed words. We would like to have AHF in this dictonary, but also to keep the CammelCase rule. It means, for words found in the dictionary, Sonar should igore the CammelCase rule.
Where can I specify this in Sonar?

We still do not support custom dictionaries for the naming rules. We have an open ticket, but I cannot promise a specific date when it will be developed.

Get different default comment doc style in Visual Studio without XML tags?

I've found out that Unity has a neat documentation in code without XML tags:
//
// Summary:
// Returns true during the frame the user starts pressing down the key identified
// by the key KeyCode enum parameter.
//
// Parameters:
// key:
I wonder if you can set up visual studio to generate this with triple slash?

Documentation conventions depend on the documentation generator.
If you want to get full intellisense with your comments, or use a documentation generator like Sandcastle, you'll need to use XML comment-style documentation.
In the other hand, if you're not interested on supporting intellisense and it's an internal project (you're not going to open source it and collaborate with other developers), you're not forced to use Sandcastle and XML comments: there're alternatives. For example, see this other Q&A: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/39227/net-documentation-generator-alternatives-to-sandcastle
BTW, the main problem with alternatives is that they won't support C#-specific items that need documentation like generic parameters, lambda expressions and many other details of C# syntax.
I caught a confusion of the OP
After chatting on comments, I caught the OP thinking that comments found in metadata of assemblies are actual documentation. They're not: they're just regular comments and it's not the source of intellisense.
Intellisense gets documentation from build-time generated XML documentation files extracted from XML comments, if this build step is enabled in project properties in the Build category.

Can resharper generate tostrings that includes all of the classes properties?

I use IntelliJ (java) IDE and it can easily generate a really nice toString() for any class that includes all the properties etc.
So in my log4net I want to output the deserialized version of a class.
Can resharper do this or do I have to manually do it myself?

Yes it can. Look at help topic Generating Formatting Members.

Why would you use 'custom attributes' in your code (.NET)

Could anyone explain the benefits (or reasons) to use custom attributes in your code. Of course I use (and understand the purpose of) defined attributes in certain scenarios (WCF, Serialization etc.), but I cannot imagine any algorithms where I would need to create and use my own custom attributes. Could someone provide a real-world case where usages of custom defined attributes bring something to a project.

The same reason as for WCF etc, but something that's specific to your project - you want to add some metadata to some members (types, fields, methods, whatever) to specify something about the mechanism involved, and it's not something which is covered by existing attributes.
For example, NUnit wanted to add their own indication that a particular type contained unit tests - there was no such existing attribute, so they created TestFixtureAttribute.
It's a relatively rare event, sure - but it can happen.

If you want to write your own system like WCF, Serialization, etc...
If you write code that iterates over types or members and does things with them, you will frequently want to use your own custom attributes to mark some members as being different or special.

I regularly use custom .Net attributes to support tooling in my infrastructure. One example was from very early in the .Net days (C# 1.0 to be exact). I was working on a research project which had a native C++ front and a brand new C# back end written by yours truly.
The front and back end shared a very similar object model which was evolving very rapidly. Not wanting to have to hand code both a C++ front end model, C++ serialization mechanism and a C# serialization mechanism I chose instead to attribute my C# types with custom attributes. They told me the parts of the model which were shared between the front and back end.
Once those attributes were in place I wrote a quick and dirty tool which
Parsed out the attributes to construct the core shared model
Generated the C# serialization code
Generated the C++ code
Generated the C++ serialization code
This made it dirt simple to keep my model up to date between my 2 projects. Just change the C# code, compile and re-run my tool.

I have used annotations in a custom AOP (Aspect-Oriented Programming) system I developed a while back. Attributes are also very useful for controlling orthogonal concerns like code generation.

Custom validation is a very good use case and can be seen from these links:
http://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2011/02/21/custom-data-annotation-validator-part-i-server-code.aspx
How to create Custom Data Annotation Validators

They can be used for marking tests, as in MBUnit for example. They can also be useful for code that inspects and loads classes (like a Plugin system) to provide meta-information.

They are really useful in building object mappers / ORM tools as well. If you ever decide to roll your own mapping system they are almost "required" to get all the functionality one would need. It's used more for making methods / classes more generic and using reflection to determine how to handle objects / select objects /etc...

To give you a specific case where I've used them. I once had to interact with a Mainframe screenscraper. I created a custom attribute to annotate which fields I wanted to send from my classes to the Mainframe, names that fell outside of conventions, special rules to deal with formatting and collections. I then had a class which was able to reflect over instances and realise which subset of fields were needed to interact with the mainframe screen scraper appropriately.

FxCop: Compound word should be treated as discrete term

FxCop wants me to spell Username with a capital N (i.e. UserName), due to it being a compound word. However, due to consistency reasons we need to spell it with a lowercase n - so either username or Username.
I've tried tweaking the CodeAnalysisDictionary.xml by adding the following section to the section:
<DiscreteExceptions>
<Term>username</Term>
</DiscreteExceptions>
From what I understand how custom dictionaries work, this should tell FxCop to treat username as a discrete term and prevent the CompoundWordsShouldBeCasedCorrectly (CA1702) check to fire an error.
Unfortunately this doesn't work. Does anybody have an idea why that is and how to solve this? I don't want to add suppressions, because this would seriously clutter the GlobalSuppressions file as there are quite a lot of occurrences.
Edited to add: For the time being I have solved this by using GlobalSuppressions, but given the nature of the issue this doesn't seem like the ideal way to solve this. Can anybody give a hint on where to look for further information on how FxCop applies the rules defined in a dictionary?

I was a developer on the FxCop / Managed Code Analysis Team for 3 years and I have your answer. Things have changed since my time, and I had forgotten exactly how custom dictionary handling worked and so it took me quite a bit of time to figure this out. :)
Executive Summary
The short answer is that you need to remove all references to username, usernames, UserName, and UserNames from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft FxCop 1.36\CustomDictionary.xml.
Normally, I would not recommend this as it should not be required, but you have found what I believe is a bug, and this is the only workaround that I could find.
Full Story
OK, now for the long answer...
The rule has two distinct checks which work as follows:
A. Check for compound words that should be discrete
Split identifier into tokens: e.g. FileName --> { "file", "name" }
Spell check each adjacent pair of tokens.
If the spell check succeeds (e.g. filename is deemed to be a valid word),
then we have found a potential problem since a single word should not be expressed as
two tokens.
However, if there is a <Term CompoundAlternate="FileName">filename</Term>
in the <Compound> section of the custom dictionary, then it is taken to mean that
although filename is a word, the design guidelines (largely as a nod to consistency
with prior art in the Framework that predates the existence of the rule) insist it
should be written as FileName, and so we must suppress the warning.
Also, if there is a <Term>filename</Term> entry in the <DiscreteExceptions>
section of the custom dictionary, then it is taken to mean that although 'filename' is
a word, it might also be two words 'file' and 'name' in a different context. e.g.
Onset is a word, but asking the user to change DoSomethingOnSet to
DoSomethingOnset would be noise, and so we must suppress the warning.
B. Check for discrete words that should be compound:
Taking the tokens from A.1, check each one individually against the set of compound
terms in the custom dictionary.
If there is a match, then we must warn in keeping with the interpretation in step A.4.
Notice that your warning: Username should be UserName is detected in part B, which does not consult the DiscreteExceptions section, which is why you are not able to suppress the warning by modifying that section. The problem is that the default custom dictionary has an entry stating that the correct casing for username is always UserName. It needs to be removed or overridden somehow.
The Bug
Now, the ideal solution would be to leave the default custom dictionary alone, specify SearchFxCopDir=false in your project file, and then merge in only the parts of the default custom dictionary that you want in the CustomDictionary.xml that is used for your project. Sadly, this does not work as FxCop 1.36 ignores the SearchFxCopDir directive and always treats it as true. I believe this is a bug, but it is also possible that this was an intentional change since the directive is not documented and has no corresponding UI. I honestly don't know...
Conclusion
Given that FxCop always uses its default custom dictionary in addition to the project custom dictionary, your only recourse is to remove the entries in question from the default custom dictionary.
If I have a chance, I will contact the current code analysis team to see if this in fact a bug, and report back here...

In the custom dictionary that comes with FxCop (located in my system in C:\Program Files\Microsoft FxCop 1.36\CustomDixtionary.xml, but YMMV) in Words\Compounds has a <Term CompoundAlternate="UserName">username</Term> entry. Delete it. You still need the discrete exception.