How can I search in Visual Studio and get it to ignore what is commented out?

Question

I am refactoring a C++ codebase in Visual Studio 2005. I\'m about half way through this process now and I\'ve commented out a lot of old code and replaced or moved it. Now I\'

Answer 1

As the other provided solutions didn't work for me, I finally discovered the following solution:

^~(:b*//).*your_search_term

Short explanation:

• ^ from beginning of line
• ~( NOT the following
• :b* any number of white spaces, followed by
• // the comment start
• ) end of NOT
• .* any character may appear before
• your_search_term your search term :-)

Obviouly this will only work for // and ///-style comments.

You must click "Use Regular Expressions " Button (dot and asterisk) on your find window to apply regex search