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

Some quotes that make me cringe:

The performance is acceptable now and I would consider the product generally shippable…

Acceptable? One of the originally stated goals for Visual Studio 2010 was better performance over 2008.  At this point, it should be more than acceptable IMO!

I’ve been running the SLCTP3 for about 3.5 hours today and its been amazing. Previously I would have crashed at least 2 times and had insane perf issues.

I can only hope that it runs without crashing and insane performance issues for those of us who are using it 8 hours (or more) a day…

I’d say the performance is about equal or maybe slightly better in some scenarios than VS2008.

I find this very disappointing… again, it was supposed to be faster than VS2008

VS2008 still feels snappier when compared side-by-side on the same VM, but the performance doesn’t bother me in this build of VS2010.

I’m glad it doesn’t bother Brian, but i sure as hell would prefer that the new version is at least faster and snappier than the previous version

Build time is 10-15% longer for the same solution compared to 2008

Excuse me? Build time in 2008 is already ridiculously slow for large solutions… the fact that it has gotten slower on the same hardware is simply unacceptable

Compilation of WPF project is >500% slower on VS 2010 SLCTP 3

Wow… just wow

Intellisense pop-ups are slow to pop up

It’s not like we need those to be fast, right?

For those of you who think i’m making a big deal out of this, you might be right.  But i’m often working with large solutions and i frequently have multiple instances of VS running at the same time.  The performance of VS2008 is at times embarrassingly bad and to think that VS2010 is not going to improve this, and likely even make the situation worse is something that i can’t really be happy about. 

Can’t we just get a Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack with support for .NET 4.0 instead?

finally

The NetBeans team has announced the availability of NetBeans 6.0 Beta 1. It’s like Visual Studio with Resharper, only free, open-source, cross-platform AND stable. Oh, and it also has a lot more features. Too bad it doesn’t support .NET or it would be my IDE of choice at home. If you’re into Java development you really should check it out. They even added Ruby (including Rails) support. And if you only do .NET, check out NetBeans anyway and see what kind of features you’ll get in future Visual Studio versions