I’ve always been a big fan of the MZTools addin for VB6, so it was a little disappointing, if not understandable, that for his .NET foray, he’s wanting to get paid a little something for it.

Not that that’s bad, I just haven’t been able to commit to MZTools for .NET just yet.

In the meantime, I stumbled across a very slick little VS addin called DPack.

It’s actually a small set of different addins. Doesn’t look like you get the source, which is unfortunate, but the features are pretty slick, plus they work in VB, C++ and even C# and Ruby.

The Code Browser alone is worth the download. With one keystroke, you get a window like this:

It’s nicely sorted, browsable, and with one other click, takes you directly to the given code element. Even better, you can assign direct keystrokes to filter only methods, classes, properties, etc. By default, ALT-M shows just the methods in the current file, for instance. Reminds me of the old F2 (Function list) key that used to be in older VB’s. I missed that key<sob>.

Also particularly nice is the “Surround Selection With…” feature. You can’t customize the surrounding text but they give you the most common items (surround with TRY CATCH, FOR NEXT, DO WHILE, REGION, etc, etc.), so that’s not too bad.

It seems very quick and stable. And the best part is, it’s completely free!