Patrick Smacchia has recently announced NDepend 5.0, the latest version of his .NET code analyzer coming with a number of enhancements: support for VS 2013, trend monitoring, new dashboard and a major UI facelift.
One of the most interesting new features is the ability to log various code metrics during analysis, and later the tool providing the ability to chart the trends of the respective metrics over time, as shown in the following example depicting the evolution of several code metrics of NDepend’s own code:
This requires using NDepend over months or years, saving metrics data, then drawing the chart(s), so the trends are not available immediately. Nonetheless, Smacchia explained a way of obtaining past log data if the different versions of the source code are available using NDepend’s API and reanalyzing the code.
Beside the about 50 predefined trend metrics, related to code size, max and averages, code coverage and third party usage, the user can define new ones using CQL or CQLinq.
NDepend 5.0 can now be integrated with all Visual Studio versions starting with 2008 up to 2013. It comes with a more modern user interface, and a new dashboard. It also has a rule filter making it easier to see what rules have been violated, and a redesigned report template.
