Do you know an alternative to NDepend for architects?

Question

Do you know any software like NDepend? I received this recently and found it very useful. It helped me a lot, but so far I have no way to buy a professional version.

So, is there an alternative (maybe open-source)? Preferably free. But not necessarily. Perhaps with a slightly more suitable price for one developer, and not for the team.

Requirements for this software: Build dependency diagrams Get code metrics View comments (for now)

Answer 1

Nitriq is a free static code analysis tool for .net. They have no graphs, but they have a treemap, and instead of learning CQL, you use LINQ to execute all your queries. You can find it at www.nitriq.com

Answer 2

There are several options

• Lattix ldm
• AssAnalyzer (This name is great for the analysis tool used by men!)

Answer 3

Do not think that you will find anything good like nDepend.

But much of what you want to do is available in Visual Studio Team Edition.

• Visual Studio has a standard metric code, we use the maintainability index and require all code to check the x index.
• To cover the comments, we set this XML document to be generated and that warnings = errors. Thus, if you are missing a comment, you will get a compilation error.
• Visual Studio also provides you code coverage for your tests.

Reflector has an additional dependency graph, which is available here:

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

Answer 4

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate has a decent "conductor of architecture", which is similar to NDepend (although not quite so). It's not free, but you may have a better chance of convincing management to buy it anyway.

Answer 5

NDepend is a pretty smooth package, and everything you find to replace it will not be as smooth or integrated, but ...

Reflector is probably one of the best development tools, there are several graphical dependency add-ons that some of the charting tools can provide. Regarding code metrics, you can use FxCop to at least identify methods with relatively high cyclic complexity.

Answer 6

CAST influences the analysis using the dependencies it is able to generate. With SEI metrics coming directly from the source (founder), this tool has some excellent non-functional metrics with custom thresholds that can display general application Intelligence toolbars based on snapshots taken overtime. Gets some resources, and you need to be clear with the business case, as it costs! check out: http://www.castsoftware.com/

Answer 7

Dependency hierarchy graph between .NET assemblies http://code.google.com/p/dependency-analyser/