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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Similarity Code Analysis
By smcculloch @ 8:49 PM :: 685 Views :: 1 Comments :: Module Development
 

One of the tools that I am using to refactor some of the module code when moving from VS 2003 to VS 2005 (DNN 3.x/4.x to 4.5.5+) is a tool called Simian.

It is primarily a refactoring tool that does similarity analysis on your code looking for duplication. It produces a log of any pieces of code it think that are duplicated accross multiple files. This is very important when multiple developers work on the same projects or on projects that evolve over a long period of time (it can be difficult to know what is available in the API). "Think of Simian as an independent pair of eyes that will assist in raising the quality of your software".

I've attached the log from Simple Gallery before the upgrade, this is an easy way to highlight where to focus your immediate energies on, because a reduced codebase is much easier to support.

The software supports Java, C#, C, C++, COBOL, Ruby, JSP, ASP, HTML, XML, Visual Basic source code and even plain text files. It also looks like they are Australian!

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By swebster @ Saturday, January 05, 2008 3:58 AM
Thats a pretty cool tool! We've been using Deklarit for code gen and refactoring for a coulpe of years and it's changed how we develop everything. This year we started using SQL Compare and Ant Profiler from RedGate for SQL management and performance tuning. I'll be sure to add this tool to our bag of tricks.

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