I use keyboard macros (control-shift-R) to get repetitive tasks done; you have to get the knack of it at first, but once you do, you can do a lot of stuff pretty quickly. For instance, you have:
DoStuff(1,2,"foo");
DoStuff(3,4,"bar");
DoStuff(123,123421,"baz");
... and so on for many lines, and you want to insert 'true' between the first and second arguments.
Put cursor at the start of the first line, then:
control-shift-R [start recording]
control-F [open 'find' dialog]
, enter esc [go to the next comma, close the find dialog]
type 'true,' [new text]
down, home [go to the start of the next line, so you're where you started]
control-shift-R [stop recording]
now you can just hit control-shift-P many times and it'll do that set of steps over and over again.
That's a simple example; you can do a lot of refactoring-like stuff pretty quickly this way, but it's also handy for wrangling big chunks of text for manual batch operations or whatever.
I'm sure if I learned how to do regexp search/replace, I could do the same sorts of things that way, but I got into this habit from using Brief a long while ago and I've stuck with thinking about "doing tasks the way I do them by hand", rather than turning them into regexps.
(presumably refactoring tools could do that particular operation, but I'm in C++ and none of them work very well there)
Other things:
- CommentReflower is a great add-in if you tend to write big chunks of comment; the original's here, and there's a VS2008 port here.
- control-K control-F -> automatically re-indent code, useful when things have got messy.
- If you need to make the same change to a bunch of project settings, don't forget you can do find-and-replace-in-files on .vsproj files.