While developers are focused mostly on the detailed implementation of projects, architects need a bird's-eye view of it.

ReSharper v8 comes with a new tool, Architecture View. Architecture View is a graph that presents the dependencies between projects in your solution. You can find a similar tool in Visual Studio Ultimate, but with ReSharper, you do not need to have this most expensive version.

Projects on this graph can be grouped based on solution folders. You can hide unimportant projects and display only dependent or referenced projects. Architecture View allows you to configure the displayed graph to provide the needed perspective.

Architecture View also presents the strength of the relation between two projects. You can easily see this by looking at the thickness of the lines linking the projects—a thicker line means a stronger relation, which means that there are more objects used between these two projects.

Architecture View can be useful for small solutions (with just a couple of projects), but the more projects you have, the more useful it will be for you.

The simple Architecture View is shown in the following screenshot:

The slightly darker area, labeled Tests, is a group that contains two projects that are in the solution folder Tests. If you have a good folder structure in your solution, you can analyze references between different layers/modules as you collapse these groups and only check contained projects if needed.

You can also save your graphs any time and compare them later, so you can quickly check what has changed in your solution.