I am trying to familiarize myself with a significant amount of existing code. Until recently I used to draw dependency graphs (Wikipedia, MSDN) between methods, by hand, to help me visualise the code. But this is very tedious.
Today this can also be automated using Visual Studio Ultimate's "Code Map", NDepend, and apparently also Debugger Canvas.
(And there are a lot of solutions to graphing project dependencies, but that is not what I want)
Can anyone suggest a way to speed up or automate the creation of such dependency graphs, without an expensive tool? Or am I stuck drawing them by hand? (I am counting Debugger Canvas as an expensive tool since it still requires Visual Studio Ultimate).
Doxygen will create them for you, though you'll need to install dot to get the graphics.
It will also take your xml doc comments and turn them into html (or other) documentation pages, and you can tell it to create caller and call graphs as well as the usual inheritance diagrams.
Doxygen is great (and free).
If you don't want the automated help, then I can only suggest a pad and a pencil.