I have always considered software development as an art and a science at the same time, in which developers translate business requirements into computer instructions, therefore creativity, innovation and technology are amalgamated into one, but the road from an idea’s inception to design then development is long and amazingly not perfect, hence we developers sometimes rush things to meet deadlines or just build the functionality with the “promise of refactoring and/or improving it” later.

As a software developer and architect, I must conduct code review for new and existing codebases. One of the challenges I have always faced is the need to query codebases, in order to find dependencies and ensure that the code and/or changes being produced will not affect or break some OOP principles neither will introduce dependency issues.

There are a few tools out there I use to check source code quality, but none of them it’s as powerful or flexible enough as NDepend.  I have been a NDepend user for a long time now, and I even posted an article about it a few years back, and besides having a refreshed user interface, it now supports CQLINQ as well as CQL (Code Query Language) being the latter for legacy and compatibility reasons.

Once we start NDepend, the start page is displayed. From it, we can start analyzing our code as well as installing add-ins for Reflector and Visual Studio.

NDepend smoothly integrates into Visual Studio since version 2008, thus making it easier for developers.

There are many features in the product, but just to mention a few:

• Multi VS solutions wide-analysis and collaboration
• Rich Code Search in VS
• Multi Query Edition in VS
• Reflector disassembly’s comparison
• Continuous comparison with a base line in VS
• Code visualization in VS
  – Dependency Matrix
  – Dependency Graph and Metric View

The Dashboard allows developers to have a quick look at how their codebase is structured, but more importantly the incurred rule violations in code. Information is displayed in a succinct and clear way, not to mention the graphics that make it easy to interpret our code better.  

I have briefly described some of the features and benefits of NDepend, but before I forget to mention, it is available to download as a 14-day trial so you can use it and get a better idea about the capabilities of the product.

Regards,

Angel

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Filed under: Microsoft - @ June 28, 2014 3:02 pm

Tags: .NET, Codebase, Metrics, NDepend, Quality, Tools, Visual Studio