code analysis

I don’t think it’s really necessary to present ReSharper (often abbreviated R#), but in case you don’t know about it, it’s a tool made by JetBrains that performs real-time analysis of your C# or VB.NET code to warn you about possible bugs, bad practices, convention violations, etc. It also provides many useful refactorings and code generators. I’ve been using it for a few years now, and it has tremendously improved both my productivity and my coding style.

I’ve been hearing quite a lot about NDepend over the last few years, but I had never tried it until recently, when its creator Patrick Smacchia was kind enough to offer me a license. NDepend is a static analysis tool for .NET that checks your code base against a large set of rules that fall in various categories, such as code quality, object-oriented design, architecture, naming conventions, etc. All of these rules are completely customizable.