I really like the feature of having a dependency diagram and preventing certain assemblies from having references to other assemblies – ensuring other developers adhere to good programming practices.
Is there an open source equivolent of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimates Dependency Diagram? I checked out NDepend, however, this is for business use, so I cannot use the free version.
Edit: Perhaps I’m referring to the layer diagram? Whatever diagram that can be used to ensure certain assemblies do not have references to other assemblies
I.E.
Business assembly
Data assembly
Data.EntityFramework assembly
Data.EntityFramework implements interfaces from the Data assembly. The Business assembly only has a reference to the Data assembly, and has an instance from Data.EntityFramework via Unity or another IoC container.
I only have Visual Studio 2010 Professional 🙁
I haven’t found anything that is a full equivalent of the layer diagrams in VS 2010.
ConQAT will let you visualize and analyze architectural conformance, but won’t enforce rules at compile time like layer diagrams can. Also, ConQAT doesn’t seem to work with VS 2010 solutions, which is a shame because it looks like it could be a very useful tool. It does support VS 2008 solutions.
Gendarme is the closest match to what you want, I think. This is a rule-based tool from the Mono team, and can be integrated into the IDE or your build server. So it will help you identify and enforce good programming practices, but it’s not going to generate any diagrams for you.
Out of the box, Gendarme comes with lots of rules for catching bad practices (long methods, lack of cohesion, deep inheritance trees, etc.). You would have to write your own custom rules to enforce your specific architectural constraints – in your case by iterating through the assemblies and checking references.
The rules are written in C# – here’s an example.