Solution Dependencies Audit

Question

We have a rather large solution with many projects under it. I am looking for a way to determine which dependencies are being used and which are not. We need to audit the solution and determine what is being used and what can be removed.

I have searched google and the visual studio gallery with no luck, does anyone know if a tool like this exists?

Answer 1

There's a couple different ways to define what "being used" means. If it's just a case of stale nuget packages that aren't referenced it's one thing, project/DLL references in individual projects that are referenced but not actually called is something else.

I can think of a couple different ways to do this. If you have Visual Studio Ultimate, you can use the "Generate Dependency Graph" under the Architecture menu to get a visualization of your various pieces, but that gets really message really fast.

Another option if you've got the cash it to buy a copy of ndepend. This thing lets you slice and dice your source code any number of ways; looking for unused dependencies is just one of the many ways you can use it to evaluate your code.