Professional Visual Studio® 2008

Chapter 5. Find and Replace, and Help

In the current wave of development technology, find-and-replace functionality is expected as a fundamental part of the tool set, and Visual Studio 2008 delivers on that expectation. However, unlike other development environments that enable you to perform only simple searches against the active code module, Visual Studio includes the capability to perform rapid find-and-replace actions on the active code module or project, or right across the solution. It then goes an extra step by giving you the capability to search external files and even whole folder hierarchies for different kinds of search terms and to perform replacement actions on the results automatically. In the first part of this chapter you will see how to invoke and control this powerful tool.

Visual Studio 2008 is an immensely complex development environment that encompasses multiple languages based on an extensive framework of libraries and components. You will find it almost impossible to know everything about the IDE, let alone each of the languages or even the full extent of the .NET Framework. As both the .NET Framework and Visual Studio evolve it becomes increasingly difficult to stay abreast of all the changes; moreover it is likely that you need to know only a subset of this knowledge. Of course you'll periodically need to obtain more information on a specific topic. To help you in these situations, Visual Studio 2008 comes with comprehensive documentation in the form ...