NDepend is a powerful tool designed to help developers maintain high-quality code by providing a suite of analysis features. This guide will walk you through the initial setup, key features, and use-cases of NDepend to help you get started and understand its benefits.
Dashboard
Attach NDepend Project: Attach a new NDepend project to your solution. This prompts a dialog to create an NDepend project to analyze your solution’s projects.
Start Analysis: Start the analysis process. The blue progress circle on the bottom right will indicate that NDepend is analyzing the solution.
Once the analysis is complete, NDepend generates an interactive HTML web report. This report contains various diagrams and dashboards summarizing key metrics such as:
NDepend reports can be integrated with any CI/CD technology such as Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, TeamCity, Jenkins, Bamboo, or AppVeyor. This ensures continuous monitoring and analysis of your code.
For the purposes of maintaining high code quality, you can configure a baseline to compare against future changes. Import code coverage data from your tests and issues emitted by Roslyn analyzers. This is configurable from the NDepend project properties panel.
NDepend offers a variety of features to help you maintain code quality:
Maintain a Clean Architecture:
Dependency Graph and Dependency Matrix: These tools help visualize dependencies within the codebase, allowing developers to identify and manage dependencies more effectively, ensuring a clean and maintainable architecture.
Generate Web Reports from CI/CD Pipeline:
Comprehensive, Interactive, and Lightweight Web Reports: Integrating with the CI/CD pipeline, these reports provide insights into code quality and changes, helping developers make informed decisions and track progress continuously.
Ensure Adherence to Code Rules:
Over 200 Code Rules for Quality and Security: By enforcing a set of predefined rules, developers can ensure their code adheres to best practices and security standards, reducing the risk of bugs and vulnerabilities.
Import Issues from Roslyn Analyzers:
Monitor Code Quality: Importing issues from Roslyn analyzers helps keep a close eye on code quality by integrating with existing analysis tools.
Quality Gates Engine:
Track Critical Quality Criteria: This feature continuously tracks essential quality metrics, helping developers focus on maintaining high standards and preventing quality regressions.
Set a Baseline for Recent Changes:
Focus Efforts on Recent Changes: By setting a baseline, developers can prioritize recent code changes, ensuring new code meets quality standards and does not introduce new issues.
Identify Code Smells and Conduct Code Reviews:
Improve Code Quality Before Merging: Identifying code smells and conducting reviews before merging helps maintain a high-quality codebase and prevents problematic code from being integrated.
Code Query Engine Based on LINQ:
Write Custom Code Rules: This engine allows developers to write their own code rules using LINQ, providing flexibility to enforce project-specific standards and practices.
Monitor Trends with Charts and Code Metrics:
Track Progress Over Time: Visualizing trends and metrics helps developers understand how their codebase evolves, identifying areas of improvement and tracking progress.
Import Code Coverage:
Ensure Thorough Testing: By importing code coverage data, developers can ensure new code is adequately tested, improving the overall reliability of the software.
Smart Technical Debt Estimations:
Track and Audit Legacy Code: Estimating technical debt allows developers to prioritize refactoring and maintenance tasks, ensuring legacy code does not hinder progress.
Comprehensive Tools to Search Code:
Find and Manage Code Easily: Advanced search tools help developers quickly locate and manage code, improving productivity and efficiency.
Issues Tab: Displays issues per source file, allows sorting, searching by file name, and viewing diffs since the baseline.
Project Tab: Lists projects along with their metrics, number of issues, code coverage, and more.
Rules Tab: Shows NDepend code rules and Roslyn analyzers violated. You can click on a rule to see its issues.
Quality Gates Tab: Displays the status of quality gates.
Trend Tab: Shows trend charts over time.
Logs Tab: Lists analysis logs for identifying issues during analysis.
NDepend is a comprehensive tool that significantly enhances code quality and maintainability. By following this guide, you can start leveraging its powerful features to ensure your codebase is robust, secure, and easy to maintain. Install the full-featured trial today and explore all that NDepend has to offer.
Stay tuned for our next posts where we will dive deeper into using NDepend with live examples. Future tutorials will cover advanced features and real-world scenarios to help you get the most out of this powerful tool.
NDepend Official Website: Visit the official website to learn more about NDepend, its features, and to download the latest version.
Getting Started with NDepend: A quick start guide to help you begin using NDepend effectively, including installation and basic usage instructions.
NDepend Videos: Explore the comprehensive documentation for detailed information on how to use NDepend and its various capabilities.
Practical NDepend Pluralsight Course: A course by Erik Dietrich that introduces static analysis and shows how to use NDepend to analyze .NET code bases, improve code quality, and enhance team productivity.