check if properties on objects are used - c#

I am working with Visual Studio 2013 and Resharper 8. I would like to be able to check my c# objects to understand if there are properties on them that are not used/referenced ie. find useages in batch.
I want to remove properties that are not being used and remove them.
Is there any easy way or automated way of achieving this?

You can do this using the "Find Usages" option:
Open up the class
Place the cursor on the property you want to search for
Press Shift + F12 (or right-click and select "Find Usages")
If the a property is not being used in the current solution, it'll tell you so:
I don't know of any way to run this for every class in the entire project / solution.

Is there any easy way or automated way of achieving this?
Solution-Wide Analysis:
Solution-wide code inspections are warnings or suggestions, that can be only detected by analysing the whole solution (unused public members, classes, and parameters, unassigned fields, suspicious type conversions etc.). These issues are highlighted in the opened files in the same way as other issues, and they also appear in the Inspection Results window when you run code inspection in specific scope.
Emphasis mine.
Note that ReSharper can only see explicit usages. If you use reflection in some way to access a member, this won't be considered by ReSharper. You can tell ReSharper about implicit usages with the UsedImplicitlyAttribute,

Not sure about automated, but there is a right-click context command when you click on the property/function/field called "find usages", which will tell you if the code is not used.

Related

VS CodeLens on Properties

I have a class that has about 1200 constant fields. I know that some of them (maybe 10%) are deprecated/legacy fields that have 0 references in the solution. Instead of going one by one and find all references, I thought that CodeLens would show me the number of references on top of each field. Unfortunately, it turned out that CodeLens doesn't provide info for fields, only methods, classes, and properties. Is there a way to find out the "useless" fields in the class? If not, is there a way to enable CodeLens (or a similiar extension) for fields?
As Arturo commented, code lens works fine for properties, it doesn't work for public fields.
What I would do in your case is try commenting out say 10 or 15 at a time, and then trying to compile. The error messages will show you which are needed, and you can uncomment those. This will leave the unneeded ones commented out. They can then be deleted.
The other way to do it is to copy the lines of code into a text editor and use a macro to turn each field into a property. Then paste these lines back in, and code lens will work.
Both ways will work, depends which you prefer. I'd prefer the latter, but it's largely personal.
Visual Studio has a great code analysis tool built into the IDE. Here is a great article to help you find and eliminate "dead code" (unused properties, fields, etc) using code analysis.

How to prevent resharper from juggling back and forth implicit and explicit variable declaration?

I've recently started using resharper and have been following its advice while writing, including that usually it tells me to use implicit variable declaration. However when then using the code cleanup function it just turns them all back to explicit, promptly warning me that I should change them back again. How can I do something about this? Preferably I would want to keep it implicit.
When ReSharper asks you to change something you can click on the little warning icon it spawns on the left and click Inspection options for "..." and change the severity or the convention so ReSharper will leave you alone on that specific convention error.
If you do want this convention only don't want ReSharper to change it back, see this question: Resharper - How to turn off 'private' access modifier?
The only way to achieve this seems to be to create your own code profile, manually copy over the default settings, configure it to keep implicit/explicit the same, then always use that profile. You cannot edit the existing profiles or copy them, you need to entirely create a new one from scratch.

Change each c# file in solution

Is there a tool or set of tools to go through a c# solution and automatically perform certain changes such as enforcing naming schemes and change for/foreach to linq if possible.
I have used Resharper to do some basic solution wide changes, but I would really like it to do more like global renaming.
Specifically, I would like a tool to rename method parameters to proper c# naming schemes. For instance, MethodA(string Field) should become MethodA(string field) and so on.
Resharper has some pretty cool features, including "Cleanup Code", which can be run on multiple files at once.
It will automatically refactor your files based on the settings you've supplied it.
They have a demo version, so you can test to see if it helps with your problem.
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
Resharper`s "Clean Up Code" tool can be run from context menu of any item in Solution Explorer. There are a few built in clean up configurations. You can configure your own. For example, you can set up order of fields\properties\methods\nested types in you class and reordering their before commit by executing clean up tool. It also can wrap its into region and so on.
Also you can force Resharper to use any of refactorings when cleaning up.(Optimize imports, remove unused methods or properties or use linq instead of loops, etc)
You can start looking from there
UPD You can use stylecop plugin to make your code correspond with the style conventions you want. It is open source and compatible with R#

How do I find all places that SET a property?

It is easy to find all code that uses a property, however how do I find the code that just sets it?
(When I do a “find all reference” on the “set”, it just does a “find all reference” on the property itself, including code that just reads it.)
You can use Resharper.
Alternately, set the setter to private (Or comment out the setter completely) and recompile. You will get errors where you're trying to set the property.
For what it's worth, this will be natively possible with VS2019.
Specifically the 'Find All References' window has a new 'Kind' column which can be filtered for 'Write' references:
The specific Github PR that added this feature is scheduled to be included in Visual Studio 2019 Preview 2 (16.0.P2) https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/22545
The full release of VS2019 is roadmapped for Q1 of 2019.
Try commenting the set part of property and build it gives error at all the places where it is used.
You could run a text search on propertyName = - you can try using regex search to allow for 0 to n spaces between the name and =.
AFAIK, this can't be done using the standard features of Visual Studio - it doesn't do anything special for properties to check whether they are being used on the left or right side when searching, and, to be sure, there's no option to tell it to do so.
To give an option without having to run extra regexes or install other software, you could just browse through the results window to let your eyes scan for left-side occurrences - maybe not the most productive but I'm not sure I see a great advantage over other suggestions.
Lastly, #Kamyar's suggestion to make the properties no longer accessible does seem worth a look, but this depends on how long it takes your project to compile, it could take even longer to find'em all - I'm not sure why you'd need Resharper to do this though.
Here's a fairly robust solution that'll work also for non-Properties using Visual Studio without 3rd party tools. Be sure to select the "Match Case" and "Use Regular Expressions" options in Find.
1. For all except Post-/Pre-fix Increment and Shift Assignments:
(^|[^\w.])MyVariable\s*([\+\-\*/%&|\^]|)=[\w\s]
2. For Post-/Pre-fix Increment and Shift Assignments:
((^|[^\w.])MyVariable\s*(\+\+|--)|(\+\+|--)\s*MyVariable[^\w.]|(^|[^\w.])MyVariable\s*(<<|>>)=)
3. For Out / Ref Parameters (N/A for Properties):
(^|[^\w.])(out|ref)\s+MyVariable[^\w.]
CAVEATS:
C#.NET only.
Visual Studio 2012+ only.
Does not work if "=" is followed by an EOL.
Does not work if "MyVariable" is followed by an EOL.
Depending on starting point and scope of the Find and scope of the Variable / Property, may find more / less references than necessary. When in doubt, error on side of "more", so you won't miss anything.
Does not work for "."-prefixed Variables / Properties.
6.1. Unless you include it as part of the "MyVariable" (i.e. "MyStructVariable.MyStructField" or "MyObjectVariable.MyObjectField") but you risk finding too few references since there may be other Struct or Object Variables used to make Assignments to the same Struct or Object Field or Property.

Finding unused classes in C# app

I'm a C#/.net/Visual Studio noob. I inherited a half-completed C# application for a mobile phone. In the course of debugging, I came across several half-finished classes that don't seem to be used anywhere else in the code. Is there a way to get determine if a class definition is instantiated anywhere?
The quickest way (in Visual Studio) is to right-click the type name and select Find all references from the context menu. This will show you all places where that type is referenced in the current solution.
You should get Resharper - it will show "dead" code in grey and make refactoring a lot easier! You may also prefer CodeRush.
Without ReSharper or a similar tool, you can always do a file search for "new ClassName(" in the entire solution.
I usually start with Shift-F12 (or right-click on class name and select "Find All References")
Unless you know the code, and the modules that may use it., CodeRush or Resharper are your better choices.
None of the other answers mentioned the modifiers which can be applied to classes/functions. You certainly want to take scope into consideration before deleting code. You may have other assemblies which use classes/functions.
Remove them from the project and let your unit tests (ahem, you have those right?) and your QA team (you have that right?) identify the problems.
Jokes aside, if it's SO obvious that it's not complete, why not simply remove the code and recompile?
The next steps I would take would be to use a tool like "Find All References" or Resharper (does it even have a feature to do that?)
You can list all the classes (searching for class [a-zA-Z0-9_]+), and then search for new <classname>. The ones not found at the second search are not used. Of course, a simple script in your favourite script language would help.
You'll need however to filter out the classes that are used as base classes of used classes.
Note that this way you'll not find the classes which are used only from unused classes, so several iterations might be needed. Moreover, if some two classes are using each other (but not used from outside), removing them might need additional effort.
Edit:
A better approach would be building dependency tree: for each of the classes you define which class is used by that class, and which class is a base class for that class. This way you find which classes are required for every single class. Then, you can define which classes are required (directly or indirectly) from the class containing Main. All other classes are "unreachable" and therefore not used.
This approach will however remove the classes instantiated by reflection. Well, there is no way to find out at compile time, which classes are going to be instantiated by reflection anyway.
Maybe using the ready tools (like others proposed) is a simpler alternative.

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