Getting Started with NDepend on Windows

NDepend runs on Windows               Getting Started
  on Linux
  and macOS NDepend runs on Linux    NDepend runs on macOS   

Getting started with NDepend (5mn)

Tutorial with explanations and screenshots

Installing the NDepend extension for Visual Studio 2026, 2022, 2019, 2017, 2015, 2013, 2012 or 2010

  1. Download the NDepend installation zip file
  2. To install NDepend, just unzip the files in a private application folder on your machine. Don't unzip files in '%ProgramFiles%\NDepend'. This might provoke problems because of Windows protection.
  3. If you are running NDepend Professional Version, just type your license key in the NDepend activation dialog to activate your machine.
  4. Start NDepend.VisualStudioExtension.Installer.exe
  5. Click the button Install for the right Visual Studio version visual studio vsix installer of the NDepend extension
  6. Start Visual Studio

Analyzing a Visual Studio solution

  1. Start Visual Studio after having installed the NDepend addin.
  2. Open the Visual Studio solution containing the code to analyze.
  3. Click the greyed NDepend circle status (bottom right of the Visual Studio window) OR click the menu NDepend > Attach new NDepend project to current Visual Studio solution
      Note:
    • A NDepend project can be attached to several Visual Studio solutions.
    • This is useful if you wish to analyze several .NET assemblies compiled with several Visual Studio solutions.
    • A benefit will be the possibility to navigate across several Visual Studio solutions opened in several Visual Studio instances.
    attach new ndepend project to the current visual studio solution menu
  4. The dialog opened proposes to create a new NDepend project (.ndproj file extension) that references the Visual Studio solution .sln file. This NDepend project file will be then referenced by the .sln file, this is how it is attached to it. By default projects containing test in their names are filtered out, they are not analyzed. If needed you can modify the filter(s). You can also reference more assemblies from the tab No assembly outside the VS solution will be analyzed.

    attach new ndepend project to the current visual studio solution dialog

  5. Click Ok : the NDepend analysis start. It will just take a few seconds to analyze your code base for the first time. If you let the Build Report check box checked, a report will be created and shown in a new browser window.

Analyzing a .NET applications using Visual NDepend

The NDepend Visual Studio extension has no impact on the Visual Studio process performances. However if you prefer you can use 100% of NDepend features outside Visual Studio thanks to the standalone executable VisualNDepend.exe. To do so:

  1. Start VisualNDepend.exe
  2. Select one of the options:
    • Analyze Visual Studio solutions and Visual Studio projects
    • Analyze .NET assemblies in folder
    • Analyze a set of .NET assemblies
    ndepend start page
  3. Click OK. It will trigger the analysis of your assemblies and code source by NDepend.Console.exe. This analysis will take a few seconds. Once done, the result is displayed in the VisualNDepend.exe UI.

Sample Reports

NDepend generates interactive web reports that provides valuable and detailed insights about your .NET code quality:

Reports of NDepend.AI Fix Runs

Five open-source code bases fixed by NDepend.AI driving Claude Code (Opus as the premium model, Sonnet as the economy model). Each report opens on its AI Assistant tab: the complete log of the run, from the planning pass to the fix rounds, the parallel agent sessions, the tests, the change review and the final report, next to the NDepend report of the fixed code, diffed against the code at the start of the run.

Code base Issues fixed Duration Cost Coverage Tests
eShopOnWeb 496 / 511 97% 1h 31min $52 45% → 98% +531 written, 644 green
Jellyfin 150 / 157 96% 1h 52min $40 31.1% → 31.6% +196 written, 3,910 green
Microsoft.FeatureManagement 283 / 292 97% 1h 06min $25 78% → 99.6% +200 written, 347 green
Carter 222 / 223 100% 39min $13 68% → 99.6% +107 written, 271 green
NodaTime 354 / 387 91% 1h 26min $48 97.9% → 99.4% +313 written, 23,029 green

The figures are those of each report's final report: the issues of the targeted set that NDepend's re-analysis finds fixed, the wall-clock duration of the run, the cost billed by the agent's provider, the code coverage before and after the run, the tests the run wrote and the tests green at the end.

Reports Compared with a Baseline


For these sample reports are imported:

Such serverless report can be generated by invoking... 

NDepend.Console.exe $absolute-path-to-an-NDepend-project-file$
...from your CI/CD running on Windows, Linux and Mac NDepend runs on Windows, macOS and Linux .

You can generate the report using a trial license, a Build-Machine license
or with the NDepend GitHub Action, which requires a GitHub Action license.

Details of the NDepend report Details of the NDepend report
Details of the NDepend report Details of the NDepend report

Use Cases

NDepend is a feature rich product. To help you get started quickly you can refer to the use cases that best fulfill your needs: