Visual Studio Find & Replace with Tagged Expressions

This is an example on how to use tagged expressions in Visual Studio Find & Replace dialog.

Say you need to replace all of the ocurrences of

MyMethod<MyType>("Identity");

with something like

(MyType)Fields["Identity"];

Then, you have to find

MyMethod\<{:w+}\>\(\"{:w+}\"\);

and replace it by

(\1)Fields["\2"];

Simple.

Notice two things here:

1. the backslashes before every reg exp metacharacter in the Find statement
2. the absence of them in the Replace statement