Andre Loker just published an
amazing introduction to
NDepend on its blog. Most of features are introduced with some methodology reminder about why it is useful. Very nice job!
Such introduction is welcomed. Indeed, something difficult in promoting a tool such as NDepend is to educate about what it can bring to your development shop in terms of agility. NDepend comes with a set of innovative features currently not supported by any other .NET tool. I like to think that what tools such as ReSharper or CodeRush are doing to your code at micro level (i.e methods' body structuring), NDepend does it at macro level (i.e class, namespace, assembly structuring). Hence, as a developer I personally use both kind of tools to automatically control every aspects of the code base I am working on.
It seems that the direction taken by NDepend is a promising one since the future Microsoft Oslo will support some similar features such as Architecture Explorer / Dependencies Matrix. Although
this could be considered as a threat for the future of NDepend, my opinion is that it is a bless both because the Oslo schedule lets enought time to continue innovating and choose complementary directions, and because this will de-facto educate massively developers/architects about the usefulness of such tooling.
