CA0055 error in FXCop

I have been setting up a new Team Build server today. All our projects are being set to do code analysis (FXCop) after the build. For one project this worked on the developer PC but failed on the build machine.

The CA0055 error means ‘file not found’ or ‘could not load’ the assembly to be analysed. Firstly I suspected there was a problem with path names being over 256 characters (both the assemblies and solutions names were long) which can be a problem MSBuild, but this was not the case.

In the end I looked in the *.CodeAnalysisLog.xml file in the build directory. This gave the inner exception and I found it was a missing DLL that was referenced by a DLL the main DLL referenced - so two hops away! I added this DLL to the project references to make sure it was in the build directory and all was OK.

TIP: read the detailed FXCop log file - it shows far more than the summary in the IDE