As a part of my Code Quality Pipeline I want to validate my code against my architectural design. This means I don’t want invalid code integrations, like client code calling directly into data access code. With Visual Studio 2012 this is no problem. First I had to create a Modeling Project. Then I captured my architecture as a layer diagram. I won’t go over the details of how to do this, but you can find resources here

• http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ShowArticle.aspx?ID=848
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/57b85fsc(v=vs.110).aspx

Next I added true to my model project’s .modelproj file. This instructs MSBuild to validate the architecture for each build. Since this is configured at the project level it will validate the architecture against all of the layer diagrams included in the project.

For a simpler way to add the configuration setting here is a MSDN walk through – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409395(v=vs.110).aspx#ValidateAuto

1. In Solution Explorer, right-click the modeling project that contains the layer diagram or diagrams, and then click Properties.
2. In the Properties window, set the modeling project’s Validate Architecture property to True.
This includes the modeling project in the validation process.
3. In Solution Explorer, click the layer diagram (.layerdiagram) file that you want to use for validation.
4. In the Properties window, make sure that the diagram’s Build Action property is set to Validate.
This includes the layer diagram in the validation process.

Adding this configuration to the project file only validates my local build. As part of my Quality Pipeline I also want to validate on Team Build (my continuous build server). There was some guideance out there in the web and blogosphere, but for some reason my options did match what they were doing. You can try the solution on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409395(v=vs.110).aspx#ValidateAuto). Like I said, this didn’t work for me. I had to right click the build definition in Build Explorer and click Edit Build Definition. On the Process tab, under Advanced, I added /p:ValidateArchitecture=true to MSBuild Arguments.

Now my code is guarded against many of the issues that result from implementations that violate the designed architecture.