NDepend v2017.3 has just been released with major improvements. One of the most requested features, now available, is the support for analyzing .NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0 projects. .NET Core and its main flavor, ASP.NET Core, represents a major evolution for the .NET platform. Let’s have a look at how NDepend is analyzing .NET Core code.

Resolving .NET Core third party assemblies

In this post I’ll analyze the OSS application ASP.NET Core / EntityFramework MusicStore hosted on github. From the Visual Studio solution file, NDepend is resolving the application assembly MusicStore.dll and also two test assemblies that we won’t analyze here. In the screenshot below, we can see that:

NDepend recognizes the .NET profile, .NET Core 2.0, for this application.

It resolves several folders on the machine that are related to .NET Core, especially NuGet package folders.

It resolves all 77 third-party assemblies referenced by MusicStore.dll. This is important since many code rules and other NDepend features take into account what the application code is using.

It is worth noticing that the .NET Core platform assemblies have high granularity. A simple website like MusicStore references no fewer than 77 assemblies. This is because the .NET Core framework is implemented through a few NuGet packages that each contain many assemblies. The idea is to release the application only with needed assemblies, in order to reduce the memory footprint.

NDepend v2017.3 has a new heuristic to resolve .NET Core assemblies. This heuristic is based on .deps.json files that contain the names of the NuGet packages referenced. Here we can see that 3 NuGet packages are referenced by MusicStore. From these package names, the heuristic will resolve third-party assemblies (in the NuGet store) referenced by the application assemblies (MusicStore.dll in our case).

Analyzing .NET Standard assemblies

Let’s be clear that NDepend v2017.3 can also analyze .NET Standard assemblies. Interestingly enough, since .NET Standard 2.0, .NET Standard assemblies reference a unique assembly named netstandard.dll and found in C:\Users\[user]\.nuget\packages\NETStandard.Library\2.0.0\build

etstandard2.0\ref

etstandard.dll.

By decompiling this assembly, we can see that it doesn’t contain any implementation, but it does contain all types that are part of .NET Standard 2.0. This makes sense if we remember that .NET Standard is not an implementation, but is a set of APIs implemented by various .NET profiles, including .NET Core 2.0, the .NET Framework v4.6.1, Mono 5.4 and more.

Browsing how the application is using .NET Core

Let’s come back to the MusicStore application that references 77 assemblies. This assembly granularity makes it impractical to browse dependencies with the dependency graph, since this generates dozens of items. We can see that NDepend suggests viewing this graph as a dependency matrix instead.

The NDepend dependency matrix can scale seamlessly on a large number of items. The numbers in the cells also provide a good hint about the represented coupling. For example, here we can see that 22 members of the assembly Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore.dll are used by 32 methods of the assembly MusicStore.dll, and a menu lets us dig into this coupling.

Clicking the menu item Open this dependency shows a new dependency matrix where only members involved are kept (the 32 elements in column are using the 22 elements in rows). This way you can easily dig into which part of the application is using what.

All NDepend features now work when analyzing .NET Core

We saw how to browse the structure of a .NET Core application, but let’s underline that all NDepend features now work when analyzing .NET Core applications. On the Dashboard we can see code quality metrics related to Quality Gates, Code Rules, Issues and Technical Debt.

Also, most of the default code rules have been improved to avoid reporting false positives on .NET Core projects.

We hope you’ll enjoy using all your favorite NDepend features on your .NET Core projects!