Visual Studio provides extensive automation model for the IDE allowing developers to customize behavior of the environment. This automation model can be accessed from Visual Studio add-ins, Visual Studio extensions, VB scripts, Power Shell and Visual Studio macro commands. The macro commands are often the best choice with their ease of development (comparing to add-ins and extension) and seamless integration with the IDE (comparing to vbs and PS).

Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2012 discontinued built-in support for macros. Several developers offered solutions to fill the gap. Text Macros by Xavier Poinas lets you record text editing operations as a macro command and then replay it as many times as needed. VSScript by Ryszard Ochodzki can record your actions and write Lua scripts with access to the most important parts of the IDE. And now Visual Commander from Vlasov Studio adds support for commands and extensions written in C# or VB with full access to the IDE and .NET framework.

Visual Commander menu in Visual Studio 2013

Visual Commander’s command is a class written in C# or VB implementing the Run method. Code of an existing Visual Studio macro from previous versions of Visual Studio can be just pasted in the Run subroutine of a new VB command.

Sample command code

In a Visual Commander’s extension you can hook to Visual Studio events (e.g. build events, window and document operations, solution and project loading, debugger events) and automatically perform custom tasks when needed.

Sample extension code

Download the free Visual Commander extension for Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 from the Visual Commander homepage or Visual Studio Gallery.