Using Standard .NET Regex in the Visual Studio Search Dialog Box

Question

As most of you know, the regular expressions used in the Visual Studio search dialog box do not match .NET Regex . This is a great PITA for me, and I often resort to external tools for finding regular expression code.

So, I have two questions:

• Why did the VS team introduce another new, custom syntax for regular expressions? Could they use the existing .NET Regex class? I cannot think of any good reason for this ...
• Is there a VS extension that will allow me to use the standard regex syntax in the Find dialog box?

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EDIT: I found two related suggestions for Connect:

• Please consider using the same regex syntax to find / replace and the regex class
• Change visual studio Find and replace to accept other non-shared text machines

The second, in fact, is more interesting, as it will provide an extensible solution ...

There are also several VS2010 extensions (like this one ) that allow you to search using regular expressions, but none of them integrates into the standard search dialog, and they don’t have a “find in files” function.

Answer 1

Visual Studio 6 finds and replaces the use of regular expressions . Thus, it would be difficult to use a future product / structure to perform such a search.