NDepend 3 Preview
Posted by Davy Brion on January 28th, 2010
I was just playing around with an NDepend 3 beta version to experiment with the new Visual Studio integration that the NDepend team has developed.
Once you install the Visual Studio addin through the VisualNDepend.exe tool, you’ll notice the following menu has been added in Visual Studio:
If you select the first item, you can easily create a new NDepend project for your current solution:
You’ll also notice an NDepend icon in the bottom-right corner of Visual Studio. Clicking on it shows you an immediate overview of NDepend’s CQL query results for your solution:
Clicking on the Show SQL Explorer immediately brings you to this view, which many NDepend users will recognize:
You can also right-click on a type (or a method) and you’ll see the following NDepend context-menu:
Which in turn allows you to open many of the familiar NDepend views:
This particular view is something that i find extremely useful. Notice how you get an immediate overview of relevant metrics when you click on one of the items in the graph. Or you can look at the metrics view:
I’ve never understood how to interpret this view, but NDepend users who do will be glad to know they can now access it extremely easily 
One thing that i can see myself make extensive usage of are the following features:
I’ve only played around with it for about 15 minutes now, but i’m impressed. I never really liked NDepend 2 because i always got completely lost in the VisualNDepend UI. Now that i have all of this integrated in Visual Studio, it just seems much easier to get to the information i really want. And if you have to review a lot of code (like me), then this new NDepend version is sure to save you a lot of time. It’s pretty much everything you’ve always wanted or already loved from NDepend, but much more easily accessible.
I did notice some small visual glitches (which might be related to running this in a VMWare virtual machine on OS X) and at one time even a Visual Studio crash, but i’m sure those issues will be fixed before the final release.
Oh, and i’m also very happy to note that this particular issue has also been resolved