Search for duplicated code in Visual Studio

Technology news and updates blog article

4th September 2008

The company TeamExpand has released a debut version of the free utility Clone Detective 1.0.0.0 to search copied pieces in the projects developed in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.
At this very moment there is the support of work with codes in C#, but in the following versions the authors promise to implement support of Visual Basic, .NET, and C++ as well. Using in codes copied code parts instead of repeated use of algorithms in the form of functions and procedures can lead to serious contradictions.
When using the utility Clone Detective, duplicate parts of programs are marked with a pink stripe. In future versions TeamExpand is planning to realize search and highlighting in the program text not only completely duplicate fragments, but also parts of a similar form but different content. This similarity could also be used as a reason for the appearance of contradictions and is the basis for the fight against “lazy” programmers capable of “copy and paste” only.