Visual Studio Hacks

384

|

Chapter 12, Extending Visual Studio

#86 Automate Visual Studio

HACK

If Not d Is active Then

d.Close( )

End If

Next

End Sub

Another way to work with a document is to manipulate its actual text. Many

of the macros in this book do this. To work with the text of the document,

you will use the

TextSelection object. The TextSelection object is a refer-

ence to the currently selected text, but it can really be used to change any of

the text in the document.

The

TextSelection object contains methods like StartOfDocument, EndOf-

Document

, StartOfLine, and EndOfLine. Something I commonly have to do is

move existing text into a try...catch block—this is something you could

easily automate using the

TextSelection object. Here is an example of a

macro that surrounds the selected text with a

Try...Catch block:

Public Sub InsertTryCatch( )

Dim selection As TextSelection = ActiveDocument.Selection

Dim text As String

text = "try" & vbCrLf & " { " & vbCrLf & _

selection.Text & vbCrLf & "}" & vbCrLf & _

"catch" & vbCrLf & "{" & vbCrLf & "}"

selection.Text = text

End Sub

You would need to write a different macro to create a VB.NET Try...Catch

block.

The

Documents object is extremely valuable. When writing macros and add-

ins, this will probably be one of the more frequent objects you use.

Invoke Commands

The DTE object includes a Commands collection that contains all of the com-

mands currently in Visual Studio. Commands ...