I recently inherited an application to work on which for whatever reason didn't have the code-behind files linked with the corresponding .aspx and .ascx files.
Visual studio looks for a codefile="class.cs" attribute in the page or control directive and this was missing.
So, when opening the application in Visual Studio the list of files was twice as long as it should have been and prevented Visual Studio from working some of it's magic like it does.
There were hundreds of files and editing each one to add the codefile="..." attribute to each page or control tag would have taken far too long.
What is the quickest way of turning this:
<%@ page language="c#" inherits="Company.Application.Class, Assembly" theme="Default" %>
... into this:
<%@ page language="c#" inherits="Company.Application.Class, Assembly" theme="Default" CodeBehind="Class.aspx.cs" %>
? Regular expressions of course !
Visual Studio can do search and replace and provides it own Regular Expression syntax that can be used (slightly different to most other versions strangely including the .NET framework itself but it works).
In case anyone needs to do this the syntax I used was:
Find what:
^{\<\%\@:bpage.+inherits=\"}{.+}\.{.+}\,{.+\"}{.+}$
Replace with:
\1\2.\3,\4 Codebehind="\3.aspx.cs"\5
Not forgetting to make sure that the 'Use:' option has 'Regular Expressions' selected.
Now, one click of the 'Replace All' button and the files were re-associated (after saving and re-opening the project).
For controls, I just replaced the 'page' part of the Find text with 'control'.
If you don't use a namespace then you may need to tweak the regex's a little but hopefully this should save you some work.