How To Configure And Use Visual Studio Macros

Microsoft Visual Studio has pretty much every operation you'd ever need right at your fingertips through the built in keystrokes. However, there are times when you'd like the text editor to do something that isn't built in. This is where macros come in. Macros can be wired up to keystrokes and can do pretty much unlimited modifications to your text - as long as you're willing to program it. In this tutorial, I'm going to demonstrate how to import an existing macro and configure a keystroke for it.

I'm not going to show you how to write macros in this tutorial. For almost anything you need, someone has already probably written it anyway. It's just a Google search away. At some point in the future, however, I'll go into the details on how to write a custom macro.

The macro I'm going to use in this tutorial is one I found especially useful a while ago that reverses the statements on either side of an assignment operator. So this:

Turns into this:

This macro is hosted on CodeProject and was written by someone named John C.

All of Visual Studio's macros can be found using the Macro Explorer, which can be accessed through the Tools menu.

If you've never added a macro to Visual Studio, the explorer should look something like this:

Macros are placed into projects and grouped together in modules. Visual Studio has already created and added the MyMacros project with one module called Module1. As you can see, however, there are no macros in that module. This is where we're going to add the macro I linked to above. The first thing you'll want to do is right-mouse click on Module1 and add a new macro.

As soon as you hit that menu item, the Macro IDE will display. This is where you'd program your macro, but in our case, this is where we past John C's macro.

Visual Studio went ahead and put a blank macro in the module for you, but all we have to do is simply replace all of the text with John's macro.

It's not quite ready to use yet. John named his module JohnUtils, but ours is named Module1. Before this macro can be used, we need to change the name of the module in John's code to Module1.

Needs to change to:

That's it. Now when you save and close the Macro IDE, the new macro will be visible in the macro explorer.

Theoretically, this macro is ready to run. If you select some lines of code, right-mouse click on the macro and select "run", it will execute on the lines you've selected. However, I don't want to have to use the mouse to run my macros. I want to hook them up to keystrokes. Fortunately, Visual Studio has a nice little keyboard editor where you can do just that. The first thing we need to do is bring up the keyboard editor, which is located under the Tools/Options menu.

That list of commands contains every command available to Visual Studio - which is a lot. It also contains all of your macros. You'll want to filter the list by simply typing "macro" in the text box above the commands.

As soon as you find the macro you want to hook up to a keystroke, simply click the shortcut keys text box and enter your keystroke. It can sometimes be difficult to find a keystroke not already used by Visual Studio, but from what I've learned, control+0 is not used anywhere. There's nothing wrong with using an existing keystroke, but it will replace whatever the original command was, so choose wisely. Once your keystroke is entered, just click the "Assign" button and everything is done. Now whenever you hit that keystroke, the selected macro will run.

There's still a lot to cover when it comes to macros, but this tutorial should give you a good introduction on how to import and use an existing macro. Look forward to more in-depth tutorials in the future on how to write your own Visual Studio macros. As always, questions and comments are always welcome.