Brian On Software

I love Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector. It’s one of those tools that makes me enjoy programming with .NET much like ReSharper does.

Whenever you’re searching for a type, a property or a string, you’ll get back a list of results containing the keystrokes you type. If you’re looking for an exact match for your search, you’d normally take your mouse and click on the Exact Match button (the last button from the search bar). I don’t like to swap my hand from the keyboard to the mouse for these kinds of operations.

Well, there’s a quicker way to search for an exact match in Reflector without having to click the Exact Match button. Just enclose your search query inside a pair of double quotes as the following screenshots demonstrate:

Searching for ‘Thread’ without the double quotes will return a huge list of types that contain the word “thread” in their name or namespace (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Searching for ‘Thread’ without double quotes

Searching for ‘Thread’ with double quotes will perform an exact match (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Searching for ‘Thread’ with double quotes