Do you know any alternative to NDepend for architects? [closed]

Answer 1

CAST does impact analysis by means of dependencies that it is able to generate. With SEI metrics coming straight from the source (the founder) this tool has some excellent non-functional metrics with configurable thresholds that can show overall Application intelligence dashboards based on snapshots taken overtime. Does take some resources, and one needs to be clear with a business case as it costs! check out: http://www.castsoftware.com/

Answer 2

There are a couple of options

• Lattix LDM
• AssAnalyzer (Interesting name)

Answer 3

Graph the dependency hierarchy between .NET assemblies http://code.google.com/p/dependency-analyser/

Answer 4

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate has a decent "Architecture Explorer" that is similar to NDepend (while not quite as good). It is not free, but you might have better chance of convincing management to buy it anyway.

Answer 5

Don't think that you are going to find anything as good as nDepend.

But a lot of what you want to do is available within Visual Studio Team Edition

• Visual studio has standard code metrics, we use maintainability index and require that all code under maintainabily index x be checked.
• For comment coverage, we set that xml doc should be generated and that warnings = errors. That way if you are missing a comment you get a compile error.
• Visual Studio also gives you code coverage for your tests

Reflector has a dependency graph addin which is available here:

http://reflectoraddins.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Graph

Answer 6

NDepend is a pretty slick package and whatever you find to replace it won't be quite as smooth or integrated, but...

Reflector is probably one of the best tools to build on, there's a few dependency graphing addins for it that can provide some of the diagramming tools. As for code metrics you can use FxCop to at least identify methods with relatively high cyclomatic complexity.