Are there any good/automateable dependency management tools for managing application, database & external resources dependencies?

Question

I would like to build an overview/map of as many of our applications dependencies as possible. Analyzing .NET application dependencies is fairly easy using tools such as NDepend (which I love!). But when it comes to external dependencies, such as databases and webservices, I need something better, and preferably something that can be automated by various tools.

For example I might have one tool populating a list of databases, another tool for populating a list of .NET applications, a third tool that gets a list of webservices and finally a tool that somehow knows how to mine the applications for dependencies between the components found by the other tools.

All or most of this could be automated so that I wouldn't have to maintain a list of dependencies myself which would be error prone and probably be outdated by the time i finish. So I would love to have a tool that could do all of it for me or at least a tool that could hold, analyze and visualize the components and dependencies, instead of building it myself. The less I have to do the better...

Answer 1

Try Lattix. It has support for databases and other technologies and will also allow you to specify your own external dependencies

Answer 2

Although Lattix is fairly flexible I found it easier to just write my own viewer and data store to get the functionality I wanted. It wasn't all that bad to do but would've been nice to use a standard solution instead of a custom one.