Search for Multiple Strings Rapidly in Visual Studio 2015 Project

Question

The short explanation: I need a way to perform many searches in a Visual Studio 2015 project in rapid succession and save the output.

The detailed explanation: I have a plain text file with about 900 legacy unique IDs used throughout a very large project. What I need to do is export a list (either plain text or csv will work) from Visual Studio that has the search results from every one of those unique IDs.

That is, I need the output of a "Find All" search in VS for each of these IDs, independently of the others (ie, I'm not trying to search for combinations or subsections of the IDs). Understandably, I'd rather find a programatic way to do this, rather than just copying, pasting, appending, and saving 900 times.

What I'm looking for: a macro program, API, internal-scripting feature, etc for Visual Studio 2015 that will let me perform a "Find All" search many times in rapid succession with different search parameters.

I already found the Text Macros plugin, which only supports text editing features, and thus doesn't help me.

Other than that, I've found that researching this type of question is quite difficult because any potentially useful results get drowned out by others trying to do something within the IDE itself.

If anyone knows of such a tool, please link to it. Thanks

Answer 1

Well, after weeks of searching I've concluded it can't be done. At first I thought this extension might be what I was looking for, but it only does text-editor based scripting. Near as I can tell, the answer to my question can be found here, referenced here:

In this version of Visual Studio, while there are literally hundreds of features, there are some we’ve actually taken out. One of those is the macros automation feature, including macro record/replay, macro projects and the Macros IDE. While we know that macros have been valuable for those who use them, unfortunately our usage data shows that less than 1% of Visual Studio developers take advantage of this feature. Therefore, we’ve found ourselves investing more deeply in the Visual Studio areas that get used every day, and have not updated macros for several releases.