Document build customization to disable analyzers when building in Visual Studio

Some users are interested in disabling analyzers in Visual Studio to improve build performance. Specifically:

• Enable analyzers for IntelliSense purposes
• Enable analyzers for command line builds
• Disable analyzers when actually building the project inside of Visual Studio

The documentation for this functionality should be preceded by a clear notice regarding the potential downside of this behavior.

⚠️ Using this build customization may change the build behavior in ways that increase the chances of developers submitting code which does not compile in the automated build environment. In particular, projects with any of the following characteristics are advised to avoid the use of this:

• Projects with /warnaserror enabled
• Projects with one or more analyzers installed that have a default severity of Error
• Projects which use a rule set file to set the severity of one or more analyzers to Error

This can be accomplished by adding the following to a project file:

<Target Name="DisableAnalyzersForVisualStudioBuild"
        BeforeTargets="CoreCompile"
        Condition="'$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' == 'True' And '$(BuildingProject)' == 'True'">
  <!--
    Disable analyzers when building a project inside Visual Studio. Note that analyzer behavior for IntelliSense
    purposes is not altered by this.
  -->
  <ItemGroup>
    <Analyzer Remove="@(Analyzer)"/>
  </ItemGroup>
</Target>

[sharwell]

@SeidChr I’m not sure which version of the compiler tools first supports it, but you can pass /p:RunAnalyzersDuringBuild=false to the build to turn them off for the command line.

[springy76]

@sharwell regarding your OP

<Analyzer Remove="@(Analyzer)"/>

Of course some of my colleges adopted your code years ago to shorten CI-build logs (too much stylecop warnings) and this week I’ve spent hours of googling and analyzing why after switching to net6 all CI-builds don’t have working razor pages (but everything else like static content, swagger, API works) - effectively this special project only has 1 razor page with dev info which isn’t essential for the app but I still wondered why it is missing now.

Guess what, I think you already know: Since NET5 there are more kinds of “Analyzers” which are faaaaaaaar moooooooore than just a simple analyzer - but some poor design(er) mixed them up being exactly at the same position:

• System.Text.Json.SourceGeneration
• Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Generators

and finally starting with NET6

• Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Razor.SourceGenerators

So my “analyzers” node in VS today consists of 7 real analyzers and 4 source generators, 9 of them default in a aspnet project +2 of stylecop. The word “generator” or “analyzer” at end of line, many times I have to scroll to see which one is which: Frustrating.