I’m a great fan of MZTools. On paper the features it offers don’t really seem spectacular, offering templates and assistants for commonly used constructs and tasks, an improved find and replace and so on. However, whilst on their own, each seems a fairly trivial addition or change, together they make a big difference.

I had the freeware VB6 and VBA version installed at SSE pretty well since I arrived, but until recently I hadn’t really looked at the newer .Net versions, not thinking I really needed them.

Anyway, recently I decided to give an evaluation of the .Net version a go, and, as with any good evaluation, found that I missed the features when the evaluation expired, so I decided to put my money down, and purchase a copy for myself.

I went for the VS2005 licence – although I primarily still work with VS2003, as Carlos Quintero, the developer kindly throws in a free copy of the 2003 version too. The 2003 version installed fine, however I hit a bit of a problem with the 2005. Part way through the install it came up with a pretty odd looking error message.

I e-mailed a copy of the message off to Carlos, who asked what platform I was using. I replied telling him that I had VS2005 installed onto an XP64 partition – and Carlos confirmed that he wasn’t able to support XP64, as he is still developing using a 32-bit system. He kindly offered me a refund, however since I could use it on a 32-bit install, and he said he was going to support 64-bit in the future I said no.

I wasn’t expecting to hear anything else for a while, at least until a 64-bit native version turned up, however this afternoon I got another e-mail from Carlos double checking my setup, followed by a zip file containing a replacement for one of the files in the installation. He asked me to replace the file, and run a single command at a DOS prompt, and hey presto, MZTools fired up fine under VS2005.

When you consider what lousy support you can get from some of the big names in the industry, it is great when you come across someone like Carlos with a great little product, and a fantastic level of support to back it up.