A few weeks ago I was contacted by Patrick Smacchia, the creator of NDepend, if I would check out the latest edition of their code quality tool. As I had an upcoming software audit assignment planned, I thought it would be a great occasion to see what NDepend brings to the table and how it can help me to improve my understanding of an unfamiliar codebase.
In preparation of the software audit, the software architect told me that one of the problems of their current codebase is that their data access logic was spread out everywhere throughout the code. They already started an effort in isolating the data access logic but he had no clue how far this has progressed.
Let’s see if we can find the answer using NDepend.
I had read in the documentation that NDepend offers the ability to query the code model using CQLinq. As a developer I like to code, so let’s try that first…
I opened VisualNdepend, loaded the NDepend project I wanted to investigate and hit CTLR-R (or go through View –> View Editor Panel).
Now I could start writing queries using the CQLinq syntax. If your query compiles succesfully, the results are immediatelly shown:
Although the syntax is easy to read and understand I couldn’t figure out the correct query to write to return all classes that where using the RavenDB client(the data store that was used). This was how far I got just by using the provided intellisense:
Luckily NDepend is there to help me. There are multiple ways to let NDepend help you get the correct query.
Let’s see one way…
I switched to the Class Browser (View –> Class Browser).
There I scrolled to the Raven.Client.Lightweight assembly. I right clicked on it and choose ‘Select Types’ and ‘…That are using me Directly’.
And there it was, the query I was trying to write myself.
Now I can see all the places where the data access logic was used directly. Nice!