A while back, I wrote JarAnalyzer and have received many positive comments from developers who have found the ability to analyze dependencies among .jar files valuable. Recently, I began working on a .Net project, and I was quite surprised to see how few open source utilities are available for .Net development. Really nothing compared to the Java world. As I began search for .Net source code analyzers, I quickly found there weren't too many open source utilities that do for .Net what JarAnalyzer did for Java. That is, analyze a set of .Net assemblies and report on the dependencies. So I decided to roll my own, and have created AssAnalyzer.

I recognize that there are a few alternative source code analyzers available, but I found nothing that offered the type of metrics (such as Afferent and Efferent Coupling, Abstractness, Instability, and Distance) I was interested in. Vil doesn't look to be very active anymore with no apparent support for .Net 2.0. SourceMonitor looks like a great utlity, but doesn't seem to offer the type of metrics I'm looking for. The cream of the crop is likely NDepend, but unfortunatley, it's not open source.

AssAnalyzer is certainly in it's infancy, but to this point, I've found it to be reliable and stable. The only documentation in existence can be found on the AssAnalyzer page, so if you find that something is poorly explained or missing, please let me know. As you experiment with AssAnalyzer, let me know what features you'd like to see included. If interest is great enough, we'll work to incorporate them.