Add old analysis to NDepend and specify date

Question

I've inherited a legacy project and have been working on improving the code this last year. To see my evolution, I've bought an NDepend license and started using it with success.

But I would like to see how I've been doing since I started refactoring. So I was wondering if you can add an analysis to an NDepend project and date it. I can still get the old DLLs, so I can run the analysis, but NDepend dates it to the date I'm running the analysis, not when it was compiled.

Answer 1

NDepend stores the historic analysis result in the directory specified by Project Properties > Analysis > Historic Analysis results.

The date is indicated by a hierarchy of folder.

• First level YYYY_MM
• Second level DayOfMonth_Hour_Minute

For example $HistoricAnalysisResultDir$\2017_09\12_14_20 means that the analysis result is dated to 12th Sept 2017, 14h20.

You just have to mimic this hierarchy manually and store in it your .ndar files (NDepend analysis result files).

A great alternative would be to write a short program base on NDepend.API to do it for you:

• create a project to analyze assemblies of an older version,
• run the analysis
• create the historic analysis result hierarchy folders
• copy there the analysis result

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Edit 10Oct2017 Having the historic analysis results available and the baseline set is not enough to update the trends. Have a look at the Power Tool source code using the trend feature, you'll see how to log trend metrics in the past.