For quite some time now I’ve been planning on writing a few blog posts about my experiences with NDepend.  NDepend is often described as a “Swiss Amy Knife for .NET developers” and I must admit there are plenty features to investigate and get to grips with.

NDepend analyses your code base against a number of code rules to check against best practice to help to ensure that the code you produce is of a high quality and doesn’t degrade over time, for more details on the wide range of features checkout the list at http://www.ndepend.com/Features.aspx.

I’ve recently been revisiting the DDD North code base and looking to tidy up and improve on a few shortcuts and quick fixes I had to put in place last year in order to get the site up and running in time!  I’ve ran the solution through the NDepend tool and here is an example of the output received:-

As you can see there is a huge amount of data and information reported by NDepend. I am now in the process of going through each element and looking at items such as the results from the Code Rules tests, Dependency Graphs, Matrices and many more application statistics.

I’ll follow up this blog post with a look at each of the elements I discover in the report and how I’ve used the information to make my code base better.  In the meantime if you’d like to take a look at NDepend  you can get a 14 day fully functional trial from here http://www.ndepend.com/NDependDownload.aspx with Getting Started documentation and videos here - http://www.ndepend.com/GettingStarted.aspx.

In addition why not check out Erik Dietrich’s great course – Practical NDepend on Pluralsight!