Code Metrics Tool - Any Ideas

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Can anyone recommend a Windows-based software metric tool that is able to:

Calculate lines of code in a particular software project. I would like to point it to a folder and the tool should recurse through all subfolders and search through all source files (e.g. *.cpp, *.c, *h, as specified), then provide the following metrics:

Number of *.cpp, *.c, *.h modules, with a line per module with some stats as below
Number of lines of code
Number of lines of comments and ratio of comments to source code
And some totals for the project

There is no need to do lint-type checking.

Obviously my example refers to C/C++ file types but it would also apply to other languages.

I don't necessarily think this should integrate with any IDE (and work off project files) - rather work on the idea that all files under certain folder should be included. This is because we are using several different tool chains.

This is of course something easy enough to write but I am sure there is something available somewhere.

Posted 4-Apr-11 15:22pm

Michael Melkonian

Updated 4-Apr-11 15:24pm

v2

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4 solutions

Solution 3

Michael,

I use SourceMonitor http://www.campwoodsw.com/sourcemonitor.html[^]
.

Posted 4-Apr-11 19:56pm

Nikolay Avrionov

Solution 4

Well how about Oz Solomon's "Project Line Counter"? We tried this on few projects a while ago in VC6. It worked pretty good.

Project Line Counter Add-In v2.10 for VS.NET and VC6[^]

Posted 5-Apr-11 4:42am

Damir Valiulin

Solution 1

This metrics tool does not look very useful.
If you want to measure programmer's performance using number of files and lines, you would highly demotivate them.

Anyway, you will find all you need if you use the following Microsoft assemblies bundled with .NET Framework: Microsoft.Build.Framework; see also Microsoft.Build.Engine, Microsoft.Build.Utilities. For custom tasks, use Microsoft.Build.Tasks. In a nutshell, you can add a custom task which analyzes existing projects and output the statistics you need. You can add such task in a special project of your solution or an existing project.

See MSBuild help: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd293626.aspx[^].

—SA

Posted 4-Apr-11 15:38pm

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

Comments

Michael Melkonian 4-Apr-11 21:50pm

Thanks for that. As I said I am looking for something generic and NOT integrated with MS .Net.

Line of code metrics can be very useful in some circumstances. No one is suggesting this as a motivational tool. Anyhow, I did not intend this question as a discussion on s/w project management.

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 5-Apr-11 13:11pm

You did not understand. What I suggest is NOT integrated with .NET. (Not in all cases.) MSBuild is a separate application using its declarative language. That's it. If you not using custom tasks, you're just writing XML project.
--SA

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This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

dasblinkenlight · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-04T16:00:00

Solution 2

I used Microsoft Line of Code Counter[^], it's a decent tool. I used it with C#, but I think it works with other languages as well.

Posted 4-Apr-11 16:00pm

dasblinkenlight

Comments

Albert Holguin 4-Apr-11 22:49pm

what does it do with text files that are not source? do they get added as if they were source or does it distinguish? ...asking mostly out of curiosity...

dasblinkenlight 5-Apr-11 6:09am

I think they provide options for you to control file/directory inclusion or exclusion. In general, I remember the setup being somewhat non-trivial (you set up a counting job first, with lots of config options, and then you run a job to obtain the actual counts). The counts are grouped by category (C#, XML, etc.), by project directory, and so on.

Albert Holguin 5-Apr-11 9:56am

reason that came to mind is that in my case, svn has somewhat "polluted" my source with the files it uses to track changes, those I wouldn't want to count in a case such as this (I used "polluted" in quotes because I don't seem to mind but others do, hence mercurial taking a different approach)

dasblinkenlight 5-Apr-11 10:08am

I use svn too - convincing MSLCC to ignore what's in .svn directories was not hard (it may have even happened "automagically", I don't remember the details).

Albert Holguin 5-Apr-11 10:11am

well that's good... my 5 for the details!

Michael Melkonian 5-Apr-11 20:21pm

Thanks for all answers I will try a few over the weekend - cheers, this was very useful

Code Metrics Tool - Any Ideas

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Code Metrics Tool - Any Ideas

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