NDepend - Analysing Your Dependencies
A while back I started reading Robert Martin's excellent Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices book.
The books very strong on object orientation and a large section is devoted to how to manage dependencies between different parts of your application. Whats great is he gives some metrics you can use to analyse the dependencies in your application, which is a great thing to do.
Anyway the good news is theres a tool for .NET that applies Robert Martins metrics to an arbitrary bunch of assemblies then does a good job of displaying them, namely NDepend.
Unfortunately there are a few problems. Firstly, as many sites point out, it runs over the IL so the cyclomatic complexity figures may be a bit untrustworthy (this is admitted at the Website). No biggy.
Other problems are more difficult to deal with, for example the fact that enums are treated as concrete classes during the analyses so skew the results...which can be a big problem and in fact kind of put the breaks on my evaluations of the tool.
This is probably a case where the tool needs to be changed to use more knowledge about the language its analysing.
Anyway I suggest you have a look at the tool and book, in fact might be worth getting the C# version of the book which is out now (reminds me to go buy it!).
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