Review: Nitriq Code Analysis for .Net

Nitriq Code Analysis
Product rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Website: www.nitriq.com
Price: Starts from $149

Code quality is one of the most critical aspects in the software and web development arena. Even if you write code, as most developers do, using an IDE such as Visual Studio, you still need to review and analyze your code to ensure error-free deployment of the application.

Nitriq Code Analysis from NimblePros is a lightweight and powerful code review tool, which has features to help you understand the code, find types and methods that should be refactored, create custom metrics, and many others. The product makes extensive use of LINQ for executing queries and related work.

A free edition of Nitriq Code Analysis is available for download. However, a professional edition is also available, which comes with more features, regular updates, and free technical support. The vendor also provides a console edition of the product, which can be used on automated build servers.

As mentioned, Nitriq Code Analysis uses LinqToCode instead of its own querying language to let users write custom queries, which means there is no need for you to learn a new language. You can also create your own formulas and visualize the code with Treemaps located at the bottom right side in the Nitriq Code Analysis window, shown in Figure 1. The Treemap is designed in such a way to show code hierarchy and highlight the query results in blue.

An interesting feature of Nitriq Code Analysis is that the query results are displayed hierarchically. This feature should help developers quickly navigate the query results. The product ships with several built-in queries, so that developers need not spend time writing all their own complex queries. Moreover, the query editor has a special Intelliprompt integrated into it, which helps developers code faster and more effectively.

Nitriq Code Analysis also comes with Statistics, which enable developers to quickly go through assemblies that have been analyzed and include some of the other factors related to the assembly.

I found Nitriq Code Analysis very easy to use. However, I suggest that the vendor provide downloadable documentation in either HTML Help or PDF format. Even so, NimblePros has provided the relevant documentation and API information online. This documentation includes demo videos that you can either view directly or download to your system. The videos will help a developer to quickly learn the usage of the product and avoid going through lengthy manuals.

Nitriq Code Analysis is useful for advanced .NET developers who want to dissect the assembly code in detail. I expect that the product will gain popularity over the period of time among .NET developers due to its simplicity and ease of use.


Anand Narayanaswamy ([email protected]) is a Microsoft MVP who works as an independent consultant based in Trivandrum, India. He is the author of Community Server Quickly (Packt Publishing) and runs www.learnxpress.com and www.dotnetalbum.com.