12/03/2019
In this post, I am going get started with a tool called NDepend. NDepend is a static analysis tool, for .net developers, which helps to understand different levels of dependencies in the code. It also provides code metrics, technical debt estimation etc, among many interesting features. I have been looking forward trying it, and in this post, I will have a first glance.
I have a chatbot application to help me with the public transportation waiting times. The core logic of this application has been moved to a class library, but it has been powering a Windows Mobile application, an ASP.Net Core website, a Service Fabric application and an Azure Functions app. Every time, I had hosted in a new platform, I had small change and refactorings on the API, though there should be a good amount of tech debt piled up. Let's see how NDepend can help me find these issues.
Getting Started
NDepend can be installed as a Visual Studio extension or as a standalone app. I have tried both versions. For iterative work, it is handy to have the tool installed as a VS extension, but otherwise, I prefer the standalone executable version of the tool. There is a free trial version and a licensed version as well.
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