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Announcing unified MZ-Tools 8.0 for Visual Studio, VBA (64-bit/32-bit), VB6...
It has been a while since the last post on this blog!. The last months have been incredibly busy to reach two huge milestones: last July 1, MZ-Tools 8.0 for Visual Studio was released, a free upgrade...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 1: Some history
This is the first post of a series to show the new features, enhancements and changes that you will find when evaluating or using the new MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA/VB6/VB5 that I introduced in October 2015....
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 2: The Setup
One of the goals for the new MZ-Tools 8.0 version was to provide a 100% error-free setup experience. While the setups for MZ-Tools 3.0 for VB6/VB5 worked always fine, the setup for MZ-Tools 3.0 for VBA...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 3: One top-level menu, two toolbars
One of the goals for MZ-Tools 8.0 was to improve the usability accessing its features, that is, its buttons. In particular, each feature should require less clicks to be reached. In MZ-Tools 3.0 the...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 4: Personal Options, Team Options, anywhere
Another improvement of MZ-Tools 8.0 is the Options window. The old MZ-Tools 3.0 suffered several deficiencies that caused many support requests: The most common issue was: “Where are the options stored...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 5: A Task List for the VBA editor
Users of MZ-Tools 3.0 for VB6 always enjoyed a task list for VB6 (actually it was introduced in MZ-Tools 2.0), but users of MZ-Tools 3.0 for VBA didn’t have such feature because technically MZ-Tools...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 6: A better results toolwindow
Two of the most appreciated features of MZ-Tools 3.0 were the Find Text and the Procedure Callers, both showing the results in a toolwindow with a treeview: In MZ-Tools 8.0, those toolwindows are even...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 7: A unified quality review
MZ-Tools 3.0 offered some limited reviews of your source code / form designers: the popular Review Source Code (although Review Dead Code would have been a better name), the Review TabIndex Property,...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 8: The Nomenclature Rules Review
One feature that was completely missing in MZ-Tools 3.0 was a nomenclature review for the names of classes, methods, variables, constants, parameters, etc. While many teams have some kind of...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 9: The Programming Rules Review
The Programming Rules Review is also new in MZ-Tools 8.0 and allows you to define custom rules such as: If a ListView has the View property with the lvwReport value, it must have the FullRowSelect...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 10: A better Code Library
Another popular feature of MZ-Tools 3.0 was the Add Code Template. In MZ-Tools 8.0 it has been renamed to Code Library and there are actually two code libraries: one in the Personal Options, for your...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 11: Unlimited error handlers
MZ-Tools 3.0 only allowed a single error handler, which was very limited in many scenarios. For example, you may want to use different error handlers for methods in a business layer ActiveX dll and for...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 12: Headers for all code elements. With...
Another area that has been revamped for MZ-Tools 8.0 is the headers for methods, classes, etc. In MZ-Tools 8.0 the feature is named Code Element Headers, where “code element” means any item such as a...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 13: The Code Element Headers Review
A new review of MZ-Tools 8.0 is the Code Element Header Review, that is part of the Quality Review feature. This review is configured in the “Options” window, “Team Options” tab, “Quality Review” >...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 14: Naming controls fast with the...
MZ-Tools 3.0 provided the TabIndex Assistant to set quickly the TabIndex property of controls. But there are two other properties of a control, the Name and the Caption, that need also to be set and...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 15: The Control Explorer and Most Used...
Another assistant in MZ-Tools 8.0 that is new for MZ-Tools 3.0 users is the Control Explorer, which shows a tree of controls for the active form or user control, along with a handy toolbar at the top...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 16: The new Database Connection String...
A handy feature of MZ-Tools 3.0 was the ADO Connection String Assistant, which allowed you to select an OLEDB Provider and to create a connection string for a database, that was copied to the...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 17: The Favorite Code Elements toolwindow
MZ-Tools 8.0 enhances also the Favorite Procedures feature of MZ-Tools 3.0, which is renamed to “Favorite Code Elements” because now you can add as favorite items not only procedures (subroutines,...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 18: Prefixes, suffixes and tags for...
In MZ-Tools 3.0 the customization options for prefixes and suffixes were quite limited. You could define prefixes only for the intrinsic types (String, Integer, etc.) and for some generic types such as...
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Moving from MZ-Tools 3.0 to 8.0 Part 19: Closing all windows, or some of them
The VB / VBA IDEs lack a menu entry or button to close all windows, so MZ-Tools 3.0 provided the Close All Windows as button on its toolbar and as menu entry on the Window menu. MZ-Tools 8.0 enhances...
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