nVentive will be presenting it's "Top 10 Umbrellas" talk at the Ottawa.NET Community on Thursday, November 5th. Come and hear us talk about Umbrella and how the ideas within can save you development time.

For the second time this year, nVentive will be presenting at DevTeach, happening in our home town of Montreal from December 1st to the 5th. Come and catch us talk about agility in our "Done Done" conversation, or about hard core programming in our "Top 10 Umbrellas" talk.

We've been looking at tools lately that could an agile team get a better view of the quality of the software they are writing. On of those is NDepend, a tool that will inspect your assemblies, determine your code's dependencies and then calculate some metrics for you to analyze. The output will typically be a report, in HTML format. Since this step can be automated, We strongly suggest that you put this into your continuous integration process because from that point, you'll be able see the metrics for your software change with time.

On a previous project, we had integrated NDepend on the daily build and at the of each iteration, we would take a few minutes to look at the reports and note a few actions to be taken during the next one. It was a great way to maintain quality and I strongly recommend you integrate it on your next project.

Now where this tool really shines, is with the VisualNDepend application. This one allows you to visualize the metrics of your software, query your software's compiled code through a SQL like language, and perform comparisons between 2 different reports.

Here are a few examples of the queries you can do in CQL:

SELECT TOP 10 METHODS WHERE CouldBePrivate

SELECT TOP 10 FIELDS WHERE CouldBePrivate

SELECT TOP 10 TYPES WHERE IsClass AND NbChildren ==0 AND !IsSealed AND !IsStatic ORDER BY NbLinesOfCode

Here are a few snapshots of the tool when run on our own Umbrella library.

This image shows Umbrella being analyzed, with the mouse pointer on one method called "Truncate". NDepend shows metrics and information all on one easy screen.

This image shows the result of the execution of 1 CQL query and where in the assembly (in blue) are located the results. Once again, bravo for NDepend: quick, concise and visual.

The author of the product Patrick Smacchia gave an interview to the Visual Studio Talk Show, a french PodCast from Montreal; if you can, we strongly suggest you listen to it and hear what the author himself has to say about this great product.

The Montreal .NET Community (formelly the GUVSM) has redone itself.

There is a new name and a new website in order to reflect the common interests that the community has in .net related technologies. There will be special interests groups for .Net, Team System, Sql and architecture. What's new though is that Francois and I will be pushing a new concept in the .net group called @Lunch.

@Lunch is basically an open session, once a month, where a subject will examined in a more informal way. It is modeled on the way Alt.NET and opens spaces work and will surely provoke a few interesting discussions. One of the things we will promote is to determine the subject of the next meeting, during the last few minutes of the meeting occuring. What an "Agile" way of learning what's most important. The first @Lunch is scheduled for September 24th and will be moderated by Francois, speaking on extension methods.

I suggest you visit the calendar, and find which sessions interest you the most. You can even subscribe to the calendar through a RSS feed; what a nice touch !

The last thing for this post is an upcoming Umbrella talk; we will be presenting our session called "Top 10 Umbrellas" at the .Net group of the Montreal .Net Community on October 20th. If you're interested in what it is, or how it can help you, we suggest you come by and listen what we have to say.

Amazing how he got it right.

This guy is busy like 10 of us and still, he's able to appreciate a piece of code I wouldn't dare taking less than 2 hours explaining the value of.

Here's what he had to say about Umbrella:

It is exceedingly broad and includes literally hundreds of new methods and helpers. However, I don't think you're expected to "learn" Umbrella as they hope you'll stumble into it...in a good way. It's like the concept of The Pit of Success. There's little easier than just falling, and the idea is that if you've designed an API correctly folks will just fall into success.

This should probably go on our home page as the project description.

Thanks Scott!

Umbrella is nVentive's attempt at filling the gaps in the existing .net framework and related technologies; hence reducing friction and increasing the predictability of the api.

It consists of a set of helpers and additional abstractions that will likely augment one's vocabulary and level of abstraction. This is the first drop of the framework, and we look forward to adding new modules, that will complement Unity, Enterprise Library, Entity Framework and more.

Go check it out on CodePlex (www.codeplex.com/Umbrella) and see how you can diminish your software's complexity by using new patterns.