Professional Visual Studio® 2008

Chapter 53. Macros

The last chapter of this part of the book is dedicated to macros. Like add-ins, macros are a very common extensibility option in Visual Studio and a built-in one. Macros are the best way to automate a task in the Visual Studio IDE.

Repetitive tasks are a common part of our daily lives, and programming is no exception. The growing number of these tasks yields many tools and applications to automate them. Many code-generation tools and applications for automating parts of programming have been introduced in recent years.

Visual Studio is an old development IDE that is being used by many developers around the world and can be used for various purposes and different application types. One of the main positive points about Microsoft products is their usability for end users, so Microsoft was one of the first companies that introduced tools for automating repetitive tasks in its products. One of the main automation options in such Microsoft products as Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and some other IDEs and tools was the macro.

The nice point about macros is that they can be generated by the macro recorder and can also be developed with programming tools, so someone without any knowledge of programming can also create a macro.

The topic of this chapter is macros in Visual Studio. You'll read some helpful information about macros, including the following:

• The anatomy of a macro

• Macro Explorer windows in the Visual Studio IDE

• Visual Studio ...