Configuration of WarningsAsErrors for .NET build

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Hello everyone!

Using SonarScanner for MSBuild as a part of your .NET build pipeline may change your failing build to unexpected successful build. This topic explains details about related configuration changes done by the scanner during begin phase.

There are two properties TreatWarningsAsErrors and WarningsAsErrors affecting behavior of warnings during build that can be configured in a project file. When set, they can fail the build with a compiler warning present in the project.

SonarScanner for MSBuild overrides these properties to prevent the build from failing.

How it works

Issues found by our C# and VB.NET Analyzers (e.g. S1481) are reported as warnings. Same as compiler messages (like CS0414). Using

<TreatWarningsAsErrors>true</TreatWarningsAsErrors>

in the project changes all warnings to errors. In that case the build would fail for every little code smell that is raised by our analyzers. And analysis results would never be reported to SonarQube due to a failing build.

To prevent this, Scanner for MsBuild injects it’s own .targets file in the build that can be found in .sonarqube\bin\targets\SonarQube.Integration.targets. Among other things, this file sets

<TreatWarningsAsErrors>false</TreatWarningsAsErrors>
<WarningsAsErrors></WarningsAsErrors>

in order to

  • prevent build from failing,
  • display analysis results in SonarQube.

What should be done

Compiler warnings should not fail the build. They should rather be imported in SonarQube with a properly configured Quality Gate. There are several options to configure when importing external issues.

What can not be done

TreatWarningsAsErrors can not be set to true for SonarQube analysis. That would fail every build without any reported issue.

What can be done

TreatWarningsAsErrors can be kept in the project file to fail the build locally. And WarningsAsErrors can be overridden by additional .targets file to fail the pipeline build for desired warnings. All relevant CS* compiler warnings need to be listed in that case.

Update existing .targets file to inject this settings or create a new one (e.g. Directory.Build.targets in the project root directory) with content like this:

<Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <Target Name="SonarQubeRestoreWarningsAsErrors"
        Condition=" $(SonarQubeTempPath) != '' "
        AfterTargets="OverrideRoslynCodeAnalysisProperties"
        BeforeTargets="CoreCompile">
    <PropertyGroup>
      <WarningsAsErrors>CS0414</WarningsAsErrors>
    </PropertyGroup>
  </Target>
</Project>

More details can be found in Microsoft docs: CSC.WarningAsErrors.

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