Do you look at the architecture of .NET projects?

Last updated by TiagoAraujo over 3 years ago.See history

To visualize the structure of all your code you need architecture tools that will analyze your whole solution.

They show the dependencies between classes and assemblies in your projects. You have 2 choices:

  • Visual Studio's Dependency Graph. This feature is only available in Visual Studio Ultimate. (recommended)
  • If you want architecture tools for Visual Studio, but don't have Visual Studio Ultimate, then the excellent 3rd party solution nDepend. A bonus is that it can also find issues and highlights them in red for easy discovery

ArchitectureToolsVS11
Figure: Visual Studio lets you generate a dependency graph for your solution

DependencyDiagramInVS11
Figure: The dependency graph in Visual Studio shows you some interesting information about how projects relate to each other

nDepend has a similar diagram that is a little messier, but the latest version also includes a "Queries + Rules Explorer" which is another code analysis tool.

nDependDependencyGraph
Figure: nDepend Dependency Graph. Issues are highlighted in red for easy discovery

Read more about nDepend: ndepend.com.

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