Sort selected text from Visual Studio context menu

Question

Currently VS has a very useful feature: sort usings (C#).

I want the same functionality for any random text, for example - XML nodes in config files.

How complex to implement that? VS addin, right? Is it possible to call some VS API which is used for sorting usings?

Answer 1

A nice AddOn for Visual Studio is Code Maid

You select some lines and chose from Context Menu "Sort Lines"

And voilá, your lines are sorted nicely in alphabetical order:

Answer 2

Edit: Note that this solution does not work on VS2013 or higher, since support for macros was removed.

You don't necessarily need to code a VS addin to do this: Visual Studio has macros built in. To get started, use Tools, Macros, Record Temporary Macro.

Here's a 'Sort Lines' command I hacked together based on the code that Record Temporary Macro gave me:

Imports System Imports EnvDTE  Public Module TimModule     Sub SortLines()         Dim Selection As TextSelection = DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection         Dim Lines() As String = Selection.Text.Replace(Environment.NewLine, Chr(13)).Split(Chr(13))         Array.Sort(Lines)         DTE.UndoContext.Open("Sort Lines")         ' Edit - see comments         ' Selection.Text = String.Join(Environment.NewLine, Lines)         Selection.Delete         Selection.Insert(String.Join(Environment.NewLine, Lines))          DTE.UndoContext.Close()     End Sub End Module