I'll give a 1 hour talk about NDepend and the CQL language for the St. Louis C# User Group on  Monday, March 10, 2008.

You can attend it online throught Office Live Meeting. The LiveMeeting link for the general public to attend Monday evening is:

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=Q28RQW&role=attend&pw=f%25d%296HXtz

The meeting will open to the general public at 5 pm (1700) US Central DAYLIGHT time.

The talk will be mainly focused on what kind of architectural constraints you can write in CQL and how it does compare with the extensibility model offered by FxCop. I'll also take a chance to present facilities offered by the GUI VisualNDepend. Here is a more complete abstract:

The FxCop tool is a blessing for every .NET developer that cares about quality. The FxCop authors even recently got awarded the Microsoft Engineering Chairman's Award, the highest award for engineering group employees worlwide. FxCop consists of an extensible set of around 200 rules that automatically check, if code correctly uses the .NET framework and abides by some good practices.

The next step is to allow .NET developers to write their own rules for their own frameworks and applications. Such custom rules might be “My UI layer should not directly access my DAL layer”, “My methods should not be too complex, except the ones automatically generated”, “My fields' names should abide by these particular regular expressions”, “Clients of my framework should use my factories to instantiate my classes”, or “The code of these particular classes is sensible and I want to be advised whenever it is updated.”

In this track, we'll see how to write such custom rules with the FxCop framework. We'll also present some new kind of specific language dedicated to query and constraint code. We'll focus our attention on the Code Query Language (CQL) supported by the tool NDepend. CQL is to code bases what SQL is to relational databases. We'll see how it is especially designed to simplify writing custom rules.