Wednesday, March 31, 2010

VS2008 Macro problem

Maybe I'm slipping in my VB skills since I've been using C# exclusively for around 2 years now, but this seems like a major user unfriendly 'feature' in Visual Studio.

Macros do not work, nor expand into macro explorer if the module in the file doesn't have the same name as the file it is in.

So when I pasted Jeff Atwood's wonderful FormatCodeToHtml Macro into a macro file in the macro editor called FormatToHtml, nothing happened. The macro file was added to the MyMacros project, but none of the actual macros expanded under it. Google was not helpful since the terms "Visual Studio 2008 macro not expanding" didn't turn anything helpful up. Apparently my code snippet on code keep is the 2nd google result for "jeff atwood rtf to html" sweet!

And the real kicker is... Visual studio doesn't complain, it doesn't show an error. It does not show any output when you click build on the macro project. It gives you no hints whatsoever.