Visual Basic® .NET Unleashed

Customizing Visual Studio

The Visual Studio .NET Automation Model is extensive. As with macros it is unlikely that you will extend the IDE regularly unless you are in the business of writing tools and add-ins, but when you have a manual, repetitive task, extending the VS .NET IDE may be just the ticket. (It is also likely that, just as new component vendors emerged to create third-party components, new vendors to build IDE extensions are likely to emerge, too.)

Macro code is reasonably safe to run because you can disable events when you load a macro project and then you have an opportunity to examine the macro code before running it explicitly. (The event macros in the last section ran because I enabled macros when the prompt—refer to Figure ...