title: Visual Studio 2015 - What does the "Analyzers" reference mean?
body: <p>Creating a plain C# Console App in Visual Studio 2015 Preview, we get a pseudo reference named "Analyzers":</p>
  
  <p><br /></p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/wwuIt.jpg" alt="Expanded Solution Explorer project &quot;References&quot; showing &quot;Analyzers&quot; entry"></p>
  
  <p><strong>What does the "Analyzers" reference just above mean?</strong></p>
  
  <p>The project file has nothing inside and the properties window shows nothing (completely blank) about this entry (though, in contrast to "reference properties" it says "folder properties" in the header, but that does not say much).</p>
  
  <p>I would expect this to be related to Roslyn, but I have no idea. I have ReSharper installed, but I don't assume it has anything to do with it.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit 6.8.2016</strong></p>
  
  <p>The accepted answer explains the tooling provided by analyzers, but leaves open why a <em>development tool</em> becomes a (runtime?) reference. Actually it is not a runtime reference, unlike the other references. So the answer to this miracle is Hans Passants comment below:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>They picked a clumsy place to add the code analyzers feature, they just couldn't find a better place without drastically overhauling the solution explorer and nuget. – Hans Passant May 26 '15 at 8:59</p>
  </blockquote>