NStatic is a tool I have followed for quite some time now, eagerly awaiting for it to become available for use. I spoke with Wesner Moise, the creator of NStatic, and he mentioned the date will be very soon.
For those of you who don't know, NStatic is a static code analysis tool. NStatic is used to track things such as redundant parameters, expressions that evaluate to constants, infinite loops and many other metrics. Unfortunately, my knowledge of NStatic is limited as I have not been able to find a copy of the tool to play with. I spoke with Wesner and forgot to ask him about getting an eval copy to explore. I actually saw a bit of a demo Wesner did for Hanselman while standing over Scott's shoulder. I was very busy that day and going in a lot of different directions so I wasn't able to really get the full demo I would have liked or talked to Wesner as much as I would have liked.
I know I like the tool and what it is able to do, and as of Thursday morning at the summit, a lot of people who had never heard of it before were talking about it, so that is great news.
I'm such a code metrics and analysis junky, that I'm sure I'm going to get to know Wesner much better once NStatic comes out. Its surely to be one of those tools, along side FxCop and NDepend, that I run as part of a formal build process, provided a console executable exists for it. Although these tools overlap in some aspects, they have very different paths for getting their data and each provide their own unique set of information, which makes each tool valuable on its own or as part of a more complete analysis package. Of course, the FxCop TFS team has started to delve into code metrics themselves, but as I have mentioned before, they don't come close to what NDepend is able to provide. NStatic is another big product that doesn't do code metrics, and may not take the place of FxCop, but is certainly going to fill in some serious gaps, which will make the tool invaluable.