Is there a way to exclude a particular type of .cs file when doing a search in Visual Studio 2005/8?
Example: In a refactoring scenario i might search to identify string literals in my code so that i can refactor them into constants or some such. However, *designer.cs files are full of string literals which i don't care to deal with but they show up in my search and pollute the result set.
i usually search for *.cs...
How do i ignore *.designer.cs?
The feature to exclude files matching a pattern has been added to Visual Studio 16.5.x
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/modernizing-find-in-files/
Any path or file type prefixed with the “!” character will be excluded from the search. For instance, you can add “!*\node_modules*” to the file types list to exclude any files in a node_modules folder.
Concerning Visual Studio 2019 16.5 (Preview 1) and above:
I'm very late to the party, but I did want to filter out the designer.vb files from my search recently, and I learned that the VS team updated the "Find and Replace" dialog in late 2019 (the one you get with Ctrl+Shift+F).
You can now filter out some extensions really easily: you just have to add the right string to the file type textbox:
The filters are separated by semicolon. A filter starting with an "!" is a filter against something. Here I added the following to exclude code from my designer files:
!*.designer.vb
which would translate to "Avoid files starting with 'wildcard' .designer.vb"
A very interesting improvement. Here's the associated blog post for more details. You should read through it.