Chapter 51. The Automation Model

Visual Studio 2008 is an integrated development environment (IDE) that lets you build several types of desktop, web, and embedded device applications and components. Despite being one of the premiere IDEs, there is something obvious that you will notice during your use of the IDE — the repeating of some tasks.

The development process itself contains many repetitive tasks and common pieces of code. In all development technologies and IDEs, we seek solutions to save time, spare developers from doing these repetitive tasks, and let them use tools to automatically insert codes and automate their development.

Visual Studio 2008, one of the most common and well-known IDEs, isn't an exception, and there are many features to provide this automation. Many aspects of the Visual Studio extensibility options are created to automate such repetitive tasks, including add-ins, macros, code snippets, and templates. In this part of the book you are introduced to the Visual Studio 2008 automation model and two extensibility options associated with it: add-ins and macros.

You'll learn that the automation model is a set of tools and APIs included in Visual Studio from the earlier versions, which let you access common functions in the IDE from your code rather than working directly with the IDE. This allows you to write code that automates processes.

Though the automation model is a set of APIs collected and inserted in a single architecture, they cover various aspects of the Visual Studio 2008 environment. Some of the Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) options apply this model to provide different extensibility and automation features for Visual Studio out of the box. Add-ins and macros are two famous and common instances of these extensibility options. Both these options apply the automation model, but they have different goals and applications that are covered in the next two chapters.

In this chapter you walk through the principles of the automation model and its code representation, Development Tools Extensibility (DTE), which is one of the most common APIs in Visual Studio 2008. Before continuing to the main body of the chapter, let's discuss the automation model in more detail.