The concept of StyleCop is wrong, because it enforces people to adhere to guidelines about the source, rather than making the source comply with their views. It’s like coding like the tool wants, rather than leaving the tool to process the code so that it adheres to certain standards.
Imagine a tool that acts like a prism, bending the source code so that people view it the way they like. All dispute like “spaces or tabs”, “there should be a space here” – resolved. And here’s the elevator pitch: if the tool is implemented like a proxy between the IDE and source control server, none of the tools will notice the difference.
The two responsibilities of the source control proxy are:
- to provide two-way transformation of the source code
- to mock the interface to the source control server (mainly by delegation of commands – only the text is transformed)
Would be neat, huh?