Getting started with Klocwork Desktop plug-in for Visual Studio

The Klocwork Desktop plug-in for Visual Studio (called the Visual Studio extension) helps you detect and fix issues before check-in. The Visual Studio extension supports analysis of many languages, including mixed projects and solutions. For more details about what languages are supported, see our Supported IDEs.

The plug-in is equipped with several popular C/C++ refactorings, such as renaming and inlining functions, that can be performed within your IDE.

As of Visual Studio 2019, the Klocwork tools can be found under the Extensions menu.

As of Klocwork 2023.3, analysis done in Visual Studio will default to the Kwcheck external analysis engine. Ensure that you have installed kwcheck in order to use the external engine. To configure kwcheck, go to Extensions > Klocwork > Options.

You can also customize project settings, issue filters and analysis settings to your own preferences. For more information about these features, see the topics below.

If you are using the Visual Studio extension with Visual Studio 2019, the first time you launch the IDE with the extension installed, the following warning will appear:

Visual Studio did not load one or more extensions that were using deprecated APIs

Select Allow synchronous autoload and restart Visual Studio. The plug-in will now work as expected and this warning will disappear. You may receive additional warning messages, however these should be ignored. For more information, see our Limitations for the Visual Studio plug-in.