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Comment by WesleyJohnson | Hacker News Reader

I always hesitate to post on these types of questions: everyone seems to be Java, Ruby, Python, etc and I feel like the Microsoft stack outcast!

Visual Studio 2010 at home and 2008 at work. We're primarily .NET so the two just kind of go hand in hand. I'm also spoiled by intellisense.

I also use Eclipse at work since we've been doing a lot with GWT on the client side (thought still using .NET on the backend).

Finally, I'll often use notepad++ for anything JavaScript simply because it takes far too long to load up VS when I want to do something small/edit a file/etc.

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If you like Eclipse and miss some of its features in Visual Studio I can really recommend Studio Tools: http://submain.com/products/studiotools.aspx

I used to run Resharper when I used Visual Studio 2005, but with 2008 there's much less need for it.

Excellent, thanks for the suggestion. I'm not a terribly efficient coder in that I rarely use keyboard commands, snippets, templates or anything like that. I do try to use GhostDoc and CodeExpress when I can, but I often forget they're installed or the key strokes to do anything useful with them since I've yet to form that habit. Still, when I do use them they're incredibly handy and Studio Tools looks like it will just as much so. The code metrics alone has me wanting to install it. :)

There's one thing I lack for Visual Studio though, and that is the ability to highlight a searchterm in a file.

Anyone knows of a simple way of getting that?

It's not a 'simple' way, but I use viemu in Visual STudio, where you can search for things in the vi way: you position your cursor on a word, press * and it will search for the next occurrence of that word, and highlight all matches. # does the same but backwards. So viemu gives you highlighting of search terms, in Visual Studio from 2003 onwards.

It also has vi-style regex searches, and it also highlights matches in that search mode.

In vim, it's :set hlsearch http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Highlight_all_search_pattern_match...

Emacs has many ways of highlighting search terms: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/385661/emacs-highlight-al...

That's nice, but totally not what I was asking for. :-)

After some more googling it appears Visual Studio 2010 has the feature, almost, and a simple plugin gives the exact functionality I want. Dunno if I want to upgrade to 2010 yet though. Hm...

Have you looked at ReSharper? It does usage highlighting (http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/features/navigation_searc...) The extra functionality it adds to VS 2008 & 2010 is really useful. I started using it about a month ago and kicking myself I didn't invest in it ealier.

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