Multiline search and replace in Visual Studio

Today I had to add a new HttpModule to A LOT of web.configs. Adding it manually would be too tedious, so I had to figure out how to search for a single line in Visual Studio 2010 and replace it with two lines of text. If I could only find a way to search for some text, and replace it with several lines of text!

Google turned up some hints about the Regex search, but no apparent solutions. After playing around a bit with the regex search in Visual studio, I found that it supports multiline text in both the search and replace strings.

When you're using "Find and Replace" in Visual Studio you can enable Regular Expressions, under "Find options", as shown in the screenshot. The regular expressions let you represent newlines in the search or replace fields, by using a \n. Cool! I've included an example below the image.

But beware, when you enable regular expressions you need to escape special characters, in my case < and >,  with a backslash. Your "Find" statement will be interpreted as a regular expression. Check out the MSDN page on regular expressions in Visual Studio to learn more about which characters are special and which are not.

Update Sep. 2012: This post deals with Visual Studio 2010. Regular expressions have changed in VS 2012, as you'll see from the link above. See the comments on this post for a new example of multiline search and replace for both VS 2010 and VS 2012.

Bugs get fixed

My bug reporting has been on fire lately. This week I received confirmation from the Google security team that a security bug I reported was found worthy of a reward (a couple of weeks ago Google fixed some issues in their two-step verification procedure). I'll be blogging the details on the security issue anytime soon.

Just now, my hotmail told me that the Visual Studio 2010 firewall setup bug I blogged about last month will be fixed in the next major release of Visual Studio. Cool!

Now, if I could only find and fix my own damn bugs. :)

VS2010 remote debugging and Windows 7 firewall

*Update, 2011/09/16: The issue has been fixed in the next major release of Visual Studio.

I've had some trouble getting remote debugging going for a development server at work. Turns out there are some oddities in the way VS 2010 creates and manages the firewall entries that let the remote machine connect back to the local computer. You'd might want to read this before checking out the MSDN articles:  How to: Set Up Remote Debugging, How to: Configure the Windows 7 Firewall for Remote Debugging.

I was working with a development server that had the remote debugging monitor installed. Others have been debugging on the server, so I was sure that the server was set up correctly. I was pretty sure my problems were caused by the setup on my local machine.

If you lack firewall rules for remote debugging, VS2010 detects this and asks you what to do:

Without giving it much thought I chose to "Unblock remote debugging from computers on the local network (subnet)". After all, the development server was somewhat "local." The remote debugging monitor reported that I connected to the server, but nothing more happened and I timed out with this error message: 

Unable to connect to the Microsoft Visual Studio Remote Debugging Monitor named 'xxxxxxx'. The Visual Studio Remote Debugger on the target computer cannot connect back to this computer. A firewall may be preventing communication via DCOM to the local computer.

I then realized that subnet was probably a keyword here, as the server was in the same domain but on a different subnet.