Introduction
MZ Tools is a Visual Studio (VS) add-in that enhances productivity. It does this by offering a number of enhancements to the VS IDE. MZ Tools comes in two flavours, Personal & Enterprise editions. Personal edition costs around $40 and Enterprise around $400. For this review I used the Personal edition (v4) as Carlos has very kindly made this available to fellow MVPs free of charge. Although MZ Tools supports both VS 2002 & 2003 and both VB.NET & C# I tested MZTools in VS 2003, mainly using VB.NET.
Installation
I received the full licence URL via email along with the licence file required to run MZ Tools. The downloaded file was just under 1Meg in size and installation was seamless and took less than a minute. When I first started VS after installing MZ Tools there was a new menu item, MZ Tools sitting on the VS menu bar. An MZ Tools toolbar was also loaded and an entry was added to the View menu called Other MZ-Tools Windows.There was also an additional MZ-Tools entry in the context menu you get by right clicking in the code window.
Use
MZ Tools offers many enhancements to the VS IDE and I have picked out a few of my favorites.
- Statistics. This is a useful little utility that displays a window with details of the current solution broken down into project and file level. Information displays includes number of code lines, number of comment lines, number of classes, modules,procedures, properties, interfaces, structures, enumerations, delegates and controls.
- Reload Active Document From Disk. Provides a quick way of reloading the active document from disk. Useful when you want to lose any changes you have made to the active document since it was last saved.
- Control Names Assistant.Displays a window that lists all the controls on the current form in the format of Text and Name properties. Useful for quickly finding controls that have not been named correctly. You can rename controls in the window.
- Control Explorer.Displays a window showing a hierarchical display of controls on the current form. Controls are grouped within their parent container. Think of it as like the Class Explorer but going right down to individual control level.
- Review Dead Code. Displays a window that allows you to choose the scope of the search. Another window is then displayed that lists all the lines of unused code in your selection. Very useful for locating unused members.
- Review Access Keys. Displays a window that allows you to choose the scope of your search. Another window is then displayed listing all the controls within the selection where an access key has not been defined or an access key has been duplicated.
- Prompt Action When Closing. Displays a prompt the first time a solution is closed allowing you to delete it from the disk. Very useful for getting rid of those quick, test projects that you never wanted saved in the first place.
- Control Default Properties.Allows you to set your own default properties to controls. I found this useful for setting the Label control Autosize property to True.This meant that whenever I add a label control to a form when MZ Tools is running the Autosize property is always set to True.
- Tab Index Assistant. Displays a window that lists all the controls on the current form that have a TabIndex property, in TabIndex order with the TabIndex value displayed. There is an option to highlight all controls that appear to be in the wrong tab order. There are buttons to move controls up and down the list, and the TabIndex property value of the two swapped controls are altered accordingly. There is also a button that automatically sets all the controls TabOrder properties. Basically this appears to use an algorithm based on left to right top to bottom placement of controls to figure out the likely TabIndex order.
Conclusion
Pros
- MZ Tools comes with an excellent help file.
- Good range of useful utilities.
- Interface easy to use.
- Responsive within the VS IDE.
- Integrated well with other VS features.
Cons
- None of the windows dock to the right or left hand side of VS, which for hierarchical style windows is a nuisance.
Overview
MZ Tools has some excellent utilities included within it. Like all the VS productivity tools I have tried it has a few unique features I like and a few omissions that I would have liked included. The $40 price tag makes MZ Tools very good value for money. The acid test as to whether MZTools is a success for me is whether I continue to use it after completing this review and to that I have to say I definitely will. I give MZ Tools 4/5.