find all occurrences of comparison with == in visual studio

Question

I made the mistake of using == for comparing IP addresses instead of using the equals() method of the IPAddress class in C#, which will result in the comparison of references instead of values. Since the solution I am currently working on is very large for a one-man project (> 100.000 lines of source code), I am very sure that I still have some of these wrong statements in my code.

Is there any possibility to tell Visual Studio to find all occurrences of == operations on a specific class for me, so that I can find and clean up the bugged comparisons?

with best regards, emi

Answer 1

It's a bit of a hack but you can temporarily add this class to your project:

namespace System.Net
{
    class IPAddress
    {
        [Obsolete]
        public static bool operator ==(IPAddress a, IPAddress b) { return true; }
        [Obsolete]
        public static bool operator !=(IPAddress a, IPAddress b) { return true; }
    }
}

Compile and look for warnings about using obsolete methods:

Warning 'IPAddress.operator ==(IPAddress, IPAddress)' is obsolete

Once you have fixed the code, remove the class definition.

Answer 2

You could always use a find / replace on "==". You can use the filters to determine what / where you want to search or just use the Entire Solution.

Answer 3

You might be able to use .NET Reflector or maybe the Visual Studio call hierarchy window to look for calls to the operator== method of the IPAdress class. I don't know if this is possible, just throwing out an idea.