I'm an admitted tool freak. I've created enough myself that I always appreciate a good one when I find one. I'll willingly spend hours learning how to setup a tool that will save me time in the long run.
Just yesterday I became acquainted with MZ-Tools. Of course the version that I really want to run is the 6.0 version for VS2005/2008. But here at 'the office', I find myself doing Microsoft Access at least part of the time and MZ-Tools version 3.0 is free for that, so what the heck... I downloaded it.
When I cranked up one of the Access projects I found a MZ-Tools toolbar with lots of goodies. I haven't even played with it all yet, but had to post about two items that make it worth the download all by themselves: Review Source Code and Generate XML Documentation.
Review Source Code went through over 51K lines of code in 246 forms in less than 30 seconds to show me a big list of variables that are not used. This is legacy code and cut-and-paste from module to module has created some of these issues, in addition to changes that have taken place where variables have not been removed. This is seriously cool!
Generate XML Documentation took about the same amount of time and produced a 1.1M XML document containing everying you'd ever want to know about the entire project. My comments are pulled out and used, Procedures are broken out with Type, Scope, Number of lines, Declaration, Parameters, Comments.
I sure wish I'd have known about this 2 years ago when I was presented all this code cold!
Oh... just found another one: "Procedure Callers" ... gives you a breakdown of where the selected procedure is being called everywhere in the project.
That's enough, I think I made my point... I'm going to go play now :) Thanks Carlos J. Quintero for a great tool! ... can't wait to see what all I'll be able to do with the VS version!
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