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So yesterday I got a surprise in my inbox when I found a message from one “Patrick Smacchia” who offered me a free professional license of his companies NDepend (http://www.ndepend.com/) product, which is a tool for developers, if I would be happy to post some comments on my blog about it.

Now, in case any of you out there are curious I’m not really a trained programmer. I’m self-taught meaning, I went out bought programming books and ask a lot of questions from others to understand what I’m trying to do. That said I would say this application is probably more than I really need but, hey! I’m willing to give it a shot and see what it does.

Ok, so I’ll give you some of my first impressions of the software.

Installation:

After receiving my licensing file and the link to the download everything went pretty smoothly. Now I was expecting a nice .msi or setup.exe file to be the way the product is delivered to my hard drive. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case. What I got was a zip file with all the application files that I could put pretty much anywhere I wanted on my computer. Naturally I put it in the Program Files folder of my computer. Now I normally would prefer to have an installer for applications like this. They usually help with the integration of the application into the windows system and also creates the shortcuts I like to use. This method doesn’t create short cuts so I’m forced to create the short cuts by hand. However, maybe this application can be ran from a USB stick which would make it more flexible. Anyway once the files were in place and I saved my license XML into the root directory I was ready to begin.

User Interface

The User Interface has a nice layout and looks like it should be a Visual Studio (I’m sure this is the look they were going for). On the start page there is a place where you can install VisualStudio and Reflector add-ons. Right now I’m not using a full version of Visual Studio but the express version so I can’t really do anything with that yet (coming soon hopefully). As well as informing you if you are using the most recent version of NDepend. It seems that this alert, which of course checks the internet for this information, uses the Internet Explorer’s proxy settings. Now I can understand why some applications do this but as I’m not a IE user I would like to see some independence in how the proxy is handled (sorry pet peeve of mine), at least it doesn’t handle proxies like Yahoo Messenger (ewww).

That’s all the time I’ve got for this right now. I still need to play with this tool some more as it does seem to be pretty complicated. I’ll be posting more things as I use it. I might remove the copy from this machine and use it on the Sharepoint development machine where I DO have a copy of Visual Studio 2008 running and see how that works with some of my Sharepoint developments.