Visual Studio macros back for VS 2015 and open source

When Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 with the new WPF-based toolbars and new look and feel, it didn’t update the Macros IDE to follow suit, keeping the same Macros IDE of Visual Studio 2008. Two years later, the Macros IDE was removed from Visual Studio 2012. Add-ins were deprecated in Visual Studio 2013 and removed in Visual Studio 2015. Add-ins are not going back (because they have packages as replacements) but macros didn’t have a simple replacement, and they filled a gap between having nothing and being forced to create an add-in even for the simplest automation task without user interface, that macros could create just recording actions. Add-ins were somewhat overkill for those tasks because even initializing them was tricky, not to mention if you wanted to create commands and buttons (if you have followed this blog all these years you already know). So, it’s not a surprise that the community used UserVoice, one of the channels to provide feedback to Microsoft, to open in 2012 this request to bring back Macros, which has now reached 6,000+ votes. In response, Microsoft created a Macros for Visual Studio extension for Visual Studio 2013 that now not only has been upgraded to support Visual Studio 2015, but also it’s open source. You have the code on GitHub and the official announcement on the Visual Studio blog here.