NDepend with Patrick Smacchia: Scaling .NET Code Quality
The Modern .NET Show
Interest on Technical Debt
Patrick emphasizes measuring the 'interest' of debt and estimating yearly lost days to prioritize fixes.
This episode of The Modern .NET Show is supported, in part, by RJJ Software's Strategic Technology Consultation Services. If you're an SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) leader wondering why your technology investments aren't delivering, or you're facing critical decisions about AI, modernization, or team productivity, let's talk.
Show Notes"So the interest plays a lot of a huge role. Like for example a security issue, it can take you maybe half a day to fix, or maybe one hour to fix; so it's very easy to fix. But if you don't fix it, you get so... you'll get so many angry users that it may be, it maybe, it will cost you your entire business; you see. So this can be seen as an interest."— Patrick Smacchia
Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Modern .NET Show; the premier .NET podcast, focusing entirely on the knowledge, tools, and frameworks that all .NET developers should have in their toolbox. I'm your host Jamie Taylor, bringing you conversations with the brightest minds in the .NET ecosystem.
Today, we're joined by Patrick Smacchia to talk about NDepend, technical debt and the interest it accrues (something that's often forgotten about), and how NDepend can help you to keep your tech debt (and it's interest) low.
"But the thing we see is that the edge code is usually the code where you get the bugs. So you end up writing some quick tests that can cover 90% of your code, but your 10% here is not tested. And because it's not well implemented and it's likely to contain the bug. So, maybe you should refactor your code and make your class testable."— Patrick Smacchia
Along the way, we talked about the common pitfalls that most developers make when writing code, and how to keep your code both testable and easy to maintain.
We also took some time to talk about bug reports, the things that you and I can do to ensure that our bug reports are read, providing positive feedback, the Visual Studio teams' velocity, and some of the amazing new features in Visual Studio 2026 like the ... well, I'm getting ahead of myself. You'll have to listen in to the episode to find out what those features are.
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Anyway, without further ado, let's sit back, open up a terminal, type in `dotnet new podcast` and we'll dive into the core of Modern .NET.
Full Show NotesThe full show notes, including links to some of the things we discussed and a full transcription of this episode, can be found at: https://dotnetcore.show/season-8/ndepend-with-patrick-smacchia-scaling-net-code-quality/
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Music created by Mono Memory Music, licensed to RJJ Software for use in The Modern .NET Show.
Editing and post-production services for this episode were provided by MB Podcast Services.
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