::: {.Section1} Eric Gunnerson is listing tools that provide code metrics for .NET (check the comments, too). As a development manager, I always wanted to like code metrics, thinking they could give me insight into a codebase I couldn’t stay intimately familiar with. However, most developers don’t like them, fearing they’ll be used as simplistic measures of progress. Another problem that I found using them in practice is that I think they must be integrated into the version control process, and the hooks for that sort of behavior are relatively recent.
While gathering [quality]{style="FONT-STYLE: italic"} metrics is definitely a best practice, I haven’t seen the evidence that gathering [structural]{style="FONT-STYLE: italic"} metrics is similarly beneficial. Still, I do think they [can]{style="FONT-STYLE: italic"} help with comprehension and perhaps give insight into areas of the codebase where problems are likely to occur.
P.S. Eric also links to this incredibly helpful mapping of Win32 to .NET API calls. :::