If I could get istantaneous results for the following simple two-question survey
- Is Visual Studio the application that you use most often?
- Did you ever use regex searches in the VS Find dialog box?
I'd bet that 80% of you would answer YES to the first question, but 99% of you would answer NO to the second question, which would be a rather weird result. Regex searches are among the most powerful VS features, yet few developers use them or even know that they exist.
IMHO, the real problem is that VS regex's syntax is completely different from the syntax you use with the Regex class, therefore using this feature requires that you learn yet another regex dialect. This is a bit too much for most developers. Microsoft should allow the standard regex syntax in this dialog: they could implement this change very easily and in a short time, without caring about backward compabibility issues.
While waiting for Microsoft to offer this little-big innovation, you can have fun with what you have today. Here are a few examples, excerpted from my new book Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language:
:i = :z Search assignments of an integer constant (:z) to a variable (:i). In VB, but more rarely in C#, it can deliver false matches, when the = operator is used in an expression.
:i = :q Search assignments of a quoted string constant (:q) to a variable.
(Dim|Private|Public) :i As String Search for variable declarations of string type (VB only). You can easy adapt it to other data types.
Dim <(:Lu(:Ll)*)+> As Search for local VB variables that use a PascalCase naming convention and therefore violate Microsoft's guidelines. (Local variables should use the camelCase convention.)
^:b*'.+\n Search for comment lines in VB, that is, lines that begin with an apostrophe. (It doesn't consider the REM keyword.) You can replace the apostrophe with // to use this search pattern in C# as well.
Dim {:i} As (.|\n)#<\1> Highlights the portion of code between the declaration of a local variable and the first occurrence of that variable in the method. You can repeat this search for all the local variables in a method and check whether you should refactor your code by moving the declaration closer to where the variable is used for the fist time. (See effect in figure below.)
