Gendarme is a extensible rule-based tool to find problems in .NET
applications and libraries. Gendarme inspects programs and libraries
that contain code in ECMA CIL format (Mono and .NET) and looks for
common problems with the code, problems that compiler do not typically
check or have not historically checked. 

Why ?

1. Because we often repeat our mistakes. The biggest one being not to review things we know;
   
2. Because it's a lot funnier (and safer) to write a rule than
   to review millions of source lines of code (SLOC) to ensure it's being
   followed.
   

History

Gendarme was originally created by Sebastien Pouliot to assist in
the security auditing process in Mono. Aaron Tomb later integrated his
.NET bug-finding code (supported by the 2005 Google Summer of Code,
GSoC) into the same framework. Since then the number of contributors (http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/mono-tools/gendarme/AUTHORS) and rules has been growing.

Gendarme tasks has proven popular in GSoC (http://code.google.com/soc/2008/) (three projects in 2007, one in 2008)
and the new Google Highly Open Participation (http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/) (GHOP) with 17 tasks
(totalling 40 rules) for the first edition (2007/2008).

Runners

Gendarme's rules are executed against user code by using a 'runner'.
This is the application responsable to load the rules, user assemblies, analysis and finally reporting defects.
Gendarme currently ships with two different runners.

Console

A console-based runner is available to use Gendarme, and the rules, on your own compiled code.
It is capable to output its results directly on the console, into XML files or into nice looking HTML reports.
This runner is the one that includes the most options.

man gendarme

will provide help about all options available from the console runner.

Wizard

A GUI (System.Windows.Forms) runner is also part of the Gendarme
distribution. This is a simple, wizard-based, runner that allows you to
select assemblies, rules and report the analysis results just like the
console runner does (i.e. text, xml or html reports). However it has
fewer options (to remain simple) than the console runner.

NAnt

Néstor Salceda (http://nestor.babuine.net/), a long time Gendarme contributor, has released a first preview version of a NAnt (http://nant.sourceforge.net/) task-based runner. A screencast (http://nestor.babuine.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/gendarme-nant.ogg) showing it in action is available. The preview can be downloaded from Gendarme's Google Group files section (http://groups.google.com/group/gendarme/files).

Rules

Gendarme is modular and load all of it's rules from assemblies, i.e. there are no hard-coded, static, rules.

For the console runner the list of loaded rules assemblies is defined in the rules.xml configuration file
and can be adapted to different needs (e.g. project specific rules).
The wizard runner will display every rules present in it's installation directory.