I have been retired as a design professional and have used MicroStation for many years in my career even as far back as Version 5 when I learned to code MDL apps for a municipal engineering entity. So in 2010 I purchased a v8I license and have been using that continuously since then.
These days I am fairly successful creating small windows apps in MicroSoft Visual Studio. One of them is to calculate the handwheel turns required for an input of decimal inches. I do many of my (hobby) machine drawings in v8i and have many times wished to have a text string with the turns data at the cursor that I can just drop into my drawing rather manually type the turn text into a text editor before I place it in the drawing.
All that previous explanation is to give a context to my actual forum inquiry which follows.
I don't recall if my MicroStation install disks have an option to install the MDL development tools or not. I'm sort of thinking they do not. I see references to a SDK in some posts but I don't know if that sort of thing is available for my legacy version. The bottom line is am I still able to put together a development platform and (compile) a .ma file that I can load into v8i? I have succeeded in creating a few macros that are invoked by a tool bar button but that I am thinking is too limited to do what I want to do.
When replying keep in mind that I am working with MicroStation v8i in "node lock" mode. My OS is Windows 10 currently. I develop apps only for my own use not for distribution and on a stand-alone computer.