Dependency graph of Visual Studio projects

I'm currently migrating a big solution (~70 projects) from VS 2005 + .NET 2.0 to VS 2008 + .NET 3.5. Currently I have VS 2008 + .NET 2.0.

The problem is that I need to move projects one by one to new .NET framework ensuring that no .NET 2.0 project references .NET 3.5 project. Is there any tool that would give me a nice graph of project dependencies?

From stackoverflow

• Have you tried NDepend? It'll shows you the dependencies and you can also analyze the usability of your classes and methods.

  Their website:

  http://ndepend.com

• I think I'll stick to the Visual Studio build order list. I checked out NDepend, but it have so powerful functionality, that their refference graph is unreadable.

  Neil Barnwell : Don't be silly - it's not unreadable it's just complex. I don't understand it too well either, but I got a good grasp of it by reading the documentation. You just need to learn what it means, same as when you learned to read code.

  Migol : Uhm, no. If all the depencies are overleaping one on each other, then it is unreadable.

  Patrick Smacchia - NDepend dev : Indeed, Graph can be unreadable by nature when there begin to have more than 20 nodes. This is why I strongly prefer using the NDepend Dependency Matrix that scales much better browsing dependencies involving many nodes.

• If you simply want a dependency graph I've found this is one of the cleanest ways to get one:

  Dependency Analyser

• You can create a dependency graph of your projects in VS 2010 Ultimate. Architecture Explorer lets you browse your solution, select projects and the relationships that you want to visualize, and then create a dependency graph from your selection.

  For more info, see the following topics:

  How to: Generate Graph Documents from Code: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409453%28VS.100%29.aspx#SeeSpecificSource

  How to: Find Code Using Architecture Explorer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd409431%28VS.100%29.aspx

  RC download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=457bab91-5eb2-4b36-b0f4-d6f34683c62a.

  Visual Studio 2010 Architectural Discovery & Modeling Tools forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsarch/threads

• You can create a nice graph of the references in your projects. I've described the way I did it on my blog http://www.mellekoning.nl/index.php/2010/03/11/project-references-in-ddd/

  Richard : All you need to do is change the output to DGML for display inside VS: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/camerons/archive/2008/12/16/introduction-to-directed-graph-markup-language-dgml.aspx

• You can get a project dependency graph easily using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, scan to 5 minutes into this video to see how: http://www.lovettsoftware.com/blogengine.net/post/2010/05/27/Architecture-Explorer.aspx

  In Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate: Architecture | Generate Dependency Graph | By Assembly.

• To complete the eriawan answer on graphs generated by NDepend see screenshoots extracted from this blog post: Interactive Code Dependencies Graph Note also that you can try NDepend straight on your code thanks to a Free Trial Edition.