63

do you know any software similar to NDepend? I've got it just recently, and found it very useful. It helped me a lot, but for now i don't have a possibility to buy a professional version.

So, is there any alternative (maybe, open-source)? Preferably, free. But not necessarily. Maybe, with a little bit more fitting price for a single-developer, not a team.

Requirements for this software: Build dependency diagrams Retrieve code metrics Display comments coverage (so far)

BenMorel
  • 34,448
  • 50
  • 182
  • 322
0100110010101
  • 6,469
  • 5
  • 33
  • 38

6 Answers6

52

Nitriq is a free static code analysis tool for .net. They don't have graphs, but they do have a treemap and instead of having to learn CQL, you use LINQ to do all of your querying. You can find it at www.nitriq.com

viggity
  • 15,039
  • 7
  • 88
  • 96
Stan Marsh
  • 590
  • 5
  • 2
  • 2
    The developer edition of Nitriq has recently been made free with registration. – Pedro Mar 29 '11 at 22:30
  • which one is the best in terms of documentation and function, Nitriq or NDepdend? – Pingpong May 02 '12 at 22:57
  • 10
    "As of July 22, 2012, all versions of Nitriq are free of charge and registration free" .. – Chandu Oct 12 '12 at 01:16
  • Seem Nitriq does not yet support Cyclomatic complexity for vb.net projects (as per http://nitriq.com/instructions on Mar 11, 2013) :( . I was looking for a tool which can give me complexity even inside methods, for my vb.net projects – Saurabh Kumar Mar 11 '13 at 15:39
  • 2
    At first sight, Nitriq seems promising, but it's definitely not mature. Simple things as storing and modifying projects are a hassle and not user-friendly. What a pity! – Jowen May 03 '13 at 12:52
  • 9
    Sadly, "free" seems to mean "free of support". Nitriq doesn't run on Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 and people have been complaining for over a year without response: http://nitriq.uservoice.com/forums/40355-general/suggestions/3395250-does-not-work-on-windows-server-2012 – NightOwl888 Jan 12 '14 at 20:41
  • 1
    @TrueWill seams their website is not working without the www any more, the image URL should be http://www.nitriq.com/content/images/largeScreenShot.png – Amr Elgarhy Apr 05 '16 at 15:58
6

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

Shiraz Bhaiji
  • 64,065
  • 34
  • 143
  • 252
5

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.

Omer Mor
  • 5,216
  • 2
  • 34
  • 39
  • 2
    Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is often close to free if you are a Micsosoft Partner, or on one of the Microsoft ISV programs. – Ian Ringrose Oct 04 '11 at 09:49
  • 1
    While the 2010 Architecture Explorer version was functionally OK, it's been greatly improved in VS2012. The usability is much better and for those new to 2012 the linked video tutorials show common use cases. If you have to chance to use the ultimate version - do it, you won't regret it. – mbx Aug 08 '13 at 06:56
3

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

Dzmitry Lahoda
  • 939
  • 1
  • 13
  • 34
3

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.

STW
  • 44,917
  • 17
  • 105
  • 161
2

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/

Anil Kuppa
  • 21
  • 1