Visual Studio Macros

Starting with Visual Studio 2003, the tradition of macro programming has been restored to Microsoft's development technology.

Visual Studio macros - "VS macros" from now on - are Visual Basic programs that automate the work that you can do inside Visual Studio - menu selections, keyboard entries and so forth. These programs can then be stored and recalled with a single command or keyboard stroke.

But a VS macro can also be a lot more than just a series of commands. Since Visual Studio .NET uses Visual Basic .NET as its macro language, macros can take full advantage of the .NET Framework and its own automation object model which includes the ability to debug the macro.

The bad news is that VB 2005 Express doesn't support macros. They had to leave something out of VBE or nobody would buy Visual Studio.

On the next page, we write a first macro to get started!