Context :

Aims : Our aim was to study the light curve periodicity of the solar analogue V352~CMa and in particular show that the presence or absence of periodicity in low amplitude light curves can be modelled with the Continuous Period Search ( CPS ) method .

Methods : We applied the CPS method to 14 years of V-band photometry of V352 CMa and obtained estimates for the mean , amplitude , period and minima of the light curves in the selected datasets .
We also applied the Power Spectrum Method ( PSM ) to these datasets and compared the performance of this frequently applied method to that of CPS .

Results : We detected signs of a 11.7 \pm 0.5 year cycle in in the mean brightness .
The long–term average photometric rotation period was 7.24 \pm 0.22 days .
The lower limit for the differential rotation coefficient would be |k| > 0.12 , if the law of solar surface differential rotation were valid for V352~CMa and the period changes traced this phenomenon .
Signs of stable active longitudes rotating with a period of 7.157 \pm 0.002 days were detected from the epochs of the light minima with the Kuiper method .
CPS performed better than the traditional PSM , because the latter always used a sinusoidal model for the data even when this was clearly not the correct model .

Conclusions :