I had the opportunity to interview Patrick Smacchia, a Microsoft C# MVP and creator of NDepend, recently about his product NDepend and how NDepend can help with code analysis, code coverage, refactoring and many other metrics to help the developer. The interview was for the developer-related web site InfoQ, where I often write.
Note: This is not intended to be a review, I may add one later. One of the other .NET Editors at InfoQ is going to be publishing a complete review of NDepend 2.6, so I won’t duplicate the effort. I just wanted to show some parts of the application and what the output looks like.
Startup Screen
I began working with NDepend a few weeks ago when I started talking to Patrick. NDepend has a nice start screen, much like that in Visual Studio 2008.
Project Loaded
Once the project is loaded the developer has access to the CQL (query language) window and find out many useful metrics about the assemblies being analyzed. The Class Browser window looks a lot like Reflector.
The NDepend Report
The report produced once the assemblies are loaded up is proportional to the size of the project. The project I analyzed was small and produced a large report. Below is just the first page of the report created with NDepend 2.6.
I am looking forward to giving NDepend a project to run through the paces with and learn how to use the product better.