Getting Started with NDepend

One of the folks over at NDepend reached out to me to provide a license for their product; let’s do some exploring!

I’ve never actually used NDepend, and have only otherwise scratched the surface using other code analysis tools. Perhaps this will be a mis-categorization, but the few I’ve worked with previously include:

• FxCop
• StyleCop
• VS Enterprise code analysis (I forget if this is the actual name, I no longer have an enterprise license)
• SonarQube

The idea of tools like NDepend seems pretty straight forward, look through your source code, and identify potential pain points that could use another look. Sounds pretty simple in theory, but I’d imagine the details of such analysis goes way over my head.

Getting started in Visual Studio

Visual Studio is no longer my IDE of choice when working in .net core, but I dusted it off to play around with NDepend. It was quite simple to get installed as a plugin for visual studio, and here’s a helpful video if it’s not otherwise obvious on how to get started: https://www.ndepend.com/docs/getting-started-with-ndepend

I didn’t really know what to expect, and I don’t have any real significant (personal) code bases that I can hook this up…