Why does Visual Studio use such a strange regex syntax

Question

Is there any reason why Visual Studio uses such a strange syntax (for instance in the search/replace dialog)?

Instead of writing \\s*(\\w+) = new Process\\(\\)

Answer 1

I quote Coding Horror:

However, you're in for an unpleasant surprise when you attempt to actually use regular expressions to find anything in Visual Studio. Apparently the Visual Studio IDE has its own bastardized regular expression syntax. Why? Who knows. Probably for arcane backwards compatibility reasons, although I have no idea why you'd want to perpetually carry forward insanity. Evidently it makes people billionaires, so who am I to judge.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/the-visual-studio-ide-and-regular-expressions.html