Promit announced the SlimTune Profiler today on his blog and it's made me antsy to formally announce my own offering to the fledgling line of software from the SlimDX Group. It's a line counter / software metrics tool that I've dubbed SlimLine, in keeping with the "Slim" moniker. It's not as flashy as a profiler, but still useful nonetheless.

I'm sure many of you have run across the startling lack of basic line counting and source statistics in Visual Studio. There is also a surprising lack of free tools out there to fill the gap. Project Line Counter seems to be thrown around every once in a while, but a quick glance at it shows it to be almost dead at this point, without even support for Visual Studio 2008. Seeing this, I quickly threw together a command line program that would parse a Visual Studio solution and do some counting. It was quick and dirty, but it worked, and after posting it here in my journal and on IRC, I found it was spreading amongst people who liked the simplicity and usefulness it provided.

For the official SlimLine, things are going to be taken to the next level. The entire source code counting code will be pushed into its own library that can be consumed by any other .NET program. Utilizing this library will be three official front ends: a command line program, a graphical Windows app, and a Visual Studio add-in. Initially, it will only be doing some simple line and file counting by project and filter, but I hope to eventually expand into other software metrics, such as cyclomatic complexity.

I like the idea of taking our "Slim" brand and applying it to other areas of development, and the line counter stuff I already had seemed like a natural fit. Like I said earlier, it's not as cool as Promit's profiler project, but it's still useful and some of you may want to keep an eye out for it in the next few months.