Visual Studio find and replace with regular expressions totally sucks.

The syntax for regular expressions in Visual studio's find and replace option are incredibly convoluted.

I wanted to replace all instances of width in a style sheet with something that was variable based.

so width:75px; would become width:@(width=75)px;

This syntax is using the new Razor view engine and the result is we set a local variable and render it to the page in a nice terse expression. Combined with:

left:@(leftStart+width)px;

we now have the beginning of a nice sliced row of images. Where all the things on a particular row would incrementally build, and then on the next row, I can reset leftStart.

This was the syntax for finding all lines of an html document and capturing the width:
width\:{[0-9]+}

And the syntax for the replacement?
width\:\@(width=\1)

I understand that c# syntax uses a ton of the same conflicting symbols, but... could you guys make something like rexexpal so that we can iteratively solve for the expressions we need?

WPF DataGrid Row-level styling

It took me a very long time to figure out how to do this. The following code takes a WPF (and probably silverlight) datagrid and changes the row foreground color based on a single property in that row.

<DataGrid AutoGenerateColumns="True"  Name="dgProjects" >

    <DataGrid.RowStyle>
                <Style TargetType="DataGridRow">
                    <Style.Triggers>
                        <DataTrigger Binding="{Binding Path=HasProblems}" Value="True">
                            <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Red"/>
                        DataTrigger>
                    Style.Triggers>
                   
                Style>
            DataGrid.RowStyle>
DataGrid>

Vs Add-in solution explorer context menus with a little MEF

My first MEF success. I wrote a visual studio add-in context menu for solution explorer where you can right click a project (or solution file for all projects) so that it:

• reads the project file checking several problem areas 
• hint paths
• copy local
• pre/post build events
• target framework version
• then makes a backup copy
• cleans those local customizations
• invokes msbuild to make sure it still builds
• brings up the Source control commit dialog
• restores your local customizations that we don't want in the source.

I used MEF so that the UI was not hard coded into the add-in. It  was amazingly simple. While I was developing a solution someone was nice enough to post on stackoverflow telling me you can't hydrate static properties. Which I did.