Google Reader found 122 posts in my blogroll about NDepend so i happily accepted the professional license which Patrick Smacchia (thank you) offered me earlier this week. I quickly picked the assemblies from a project that has evolved over more than 5 years (.NET 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0) and the tool generated a screen loaded with data, but i found it difficult to extract any valuable information out of the statistics. Although i found zooming in the UI impressive, i was a bit disappointed.

Today i decided to start with something more sensible and created an NDepend project for the BeTimvwFramework solution. In order to add the code coverage results i first had to export them from visual studio. And then i let the analyzer do it’s job. In the results of the default CQL queries i found that the DateTimeHelper class was stateless, and thus could be turned into a static class. I also noticed the warning that the UnixEpoch field was public. After giving it a bit of thought i decided to leave the field public, but make it readonly. Although i have only used the tool for only an hour or so, it has already proven it’s usefulness. More experimentation is definitely required.

I will finish with a couple of feature requests:

• Automate the import of code coverage results generated by Visual Studio.
• Use the default browser instead of launching Internet Explorer.