Consolidating and Version-controlling Development Settings

Terry Thibodeau — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Those who know me know that I hate repetition. Reducing duplication and improving productivity is usually the driving force behind much that I do with computers (other than my day job of software development). After installing Visual Studio 2008 and new...(read more)

Visual Studio HTML link creation macro

Terry Thibodeau — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 23:54:00 GMT

Today, I was editing some HTML in an aspx content page that I had pasted in from a Word doc. The document had quite a few URLs in it that needed "linkifying" (add "<a href", etc).

As I find myself doing this kind of editing quite a bit, I decided to write a quick macro to accomplish the task. There are many improvements that could be made to automatically search out URLs, set the target, etc. but, this is a first iteration. Feel free to share your improvements. ;)

Sub Linkify()

Dim selection As TextSelection = CType(DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection, TextSelection)

Dim selectedText As String = selection.Text.Trim()

If selectedText = String.Empty Then

MsgBox("Nothing selected", MsgBoxStyle.Exclamation)

Exit Sub

End If

selection.Delete()

selection.Insert(String.Format("<a href=""{0}"" target=""_blank"">{0}</a>", selectedText))

selection.LineDown()

selection.StartOfLine(vsStartOfLineOptions.vsStartOfLineOptionsFirstText)

End Sub

In Visual Studio, select the URL you wish to "linkify"

http://www.connicus.com

and run the macro. Voila!

<a href="http://www.connicus.com" target="_blank">http://www.connicus.com</a>

Terry Thibodeau's Blog : Visual Studio, productivity

Consolidating and Version-controlling Development Settings

Visual Studio HTML link creation macro