Monthly Archives: August 2007

MZ-Tools Articles Series

MZ-Tools Articles Series: HOWTO: Use the system font in dialogs and toolwindows of a Visual Studio add-in

While Visual Studio .NET 2002/2003 use their own font setting for dialogs and toolwindows, Visual Studio 2005 and higher honor the system font, which in Windows Vista is no longer the Tahoma 8.25pt of Windows XP or Windows 2000. See how to do it in your own add-in with my latest article: 

HOWTO: Use the system font in dialogs and toolwindows of a Visual Studio add-in
http://www.mztools.com/articles/2007/MZ2007030.aspx

Other

Announcing MZ-Tools 6.0 for VS.NET

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Wow, it’s has been more than a month since I wrote my last post! No, no vacations yet 🙁 There was a good reason: I have spent the last weeks doing heavy work around my MZ-Tools add-in:

  • Using the nothing short of wonderful Help and Manual product I have given up HTML Help Workshop and now I am using a professional tool to make the HTML Help (.chm) files of MZ-Tools.
  • As a plus, that tool allows me to generate online help that is now on the web site.
  • I got the help reviewed by Omer Kircher, an American customer of mine, since English is not my native language. Omer has done a wonderful job pinpointing even the smallest errors. He is the author of http://www.convert-units.net/, likely the most powerful unit converter that you’ll ever see. Now I can know how many square meters is a “Spanish (area) fanega” 🙂 (my grandfathers used that unit to measure the fields in their village).
  • I captured more modern (that is, Windows Vista) screenshoots for the help files.
  • I have converted the MZ-Tools web site from pure HTML to ASP.NET 2.0 (XHTML) with Visual Studio 2005 (bye bye FrontPage). I also ensured that the old links still work, specially for the MZ-Tools articles, very popular.
  • I am now using Perforce as my source control tool.
  • I created a tool to perform automatic MZ-Tools builds (bye bye .bat script file). I know that there are visual tools out there to do this but I am much more satisfied with my custom tool.
  • I created a new customer database much more flexible to add new releases and upgrades.
  • And finally, I created a new MZ-Tools 6.0 version that adds no new features (that will be in the future MZ-Tools 7.0) but targets all VS.NET IDEs from 2002, including Visual Studio 2008 (aka “Orcas”)!. So, the new setup (I had to create a new setup, of course) detects your installed VS.NET IDEs and allows you to select which ones to install MZ-Tools for. So, there is no more “MZ-Tools 4.0 for VS.NET 2002/2003” and “MZ-Tools 2005 for VS 2005”, just “MZ-Tools 6.0 for VS.NET”. As a good side effect now MZ-Tools uses the same XML configuration files for all the IDEs. Best of all, this upgrade is free for all MZ-Tools customers.

I have still work to do on the web site during the next weeks (animated pictures to show features, etc.) but hopefully I will have time to write two new articles about add-ins with things that I have learned these weeks. Stay tuned!

Did I mention that I will take soon some days off for a well deserved vacation? 🙂