Multi-project analysis - Introduction

Enterprise Edition only

Multi-project analysis analyzes several projects together. It supports .vbg and .sln files.

The most fundamental entity in project analysis is the project. Visual Basic projects are described in .vbp, .vbproj, .vbdproj and .mak files, depending on the VB version. All editions of Project Analyzer support single-project analysis where you analyze one project at a time.

Larger systems may consist of several projects, for example, a standard executable project, a .dll library project, and several .ocx component projects. When you need to find out the dependencies between several projects, you need multi-project analysis.

What can you do with multi-project analysis?

Project Analyzer Enterprise Edition supports analysis of several projects at a time. The Enterprise Edition is required if you want to

Supported multi-project analyses

Multi-project analysis is typically used when a project calls other projects in the same project group or solution. It's also used when a project uses a library file.

You can always analyze several classic VB projects together, and several VB.NET projects together. Analysis of mixed systems (both classic VB and VB.NET) is limited. The following table lists which combinations are supported and which ones are limited.

Target project
Source project Classic VB VB.NET
Classic VB Supported To .tlb file only
VB.NET Limited Supported

In addition, multi-project analysis is handy is if there are several projects that don't call each other, but that share some source code files. For example, two .exe projects that have common .bas or .cls files can be analyzed together to show up dead code that's not used by either of the projects. This arrangement often makes Super Project Analyzer redundant in the Enterprise Edition.

Unsupported analyses and limitations

Limitations in mixed version analysis and COM Interop

Multi-project analysis can analyze systems consisting of projects written with several VB versions. COM Interop in .NET is supported only partially. If you mix VB Classic and .NET projects, or .NET projects and COM files, there are some limitations.

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