"Now this really pisses me off to no end!"

I generally prefer working with Microsoft's integrated software development tools rather than trying to sort out the issues that come with combining tools from multiple vendors, but every now and then they do something that makes me want to go David Lo-Pan on thier ass, and I'm talking about the ten foot tall roadblock, not the little old basket case on wheels.

For some ungodly reason, Microsoft included a regular expression engine in the Visual Studio 2005 Find utility that has colons in its syntax, which along with other divergences from standards essentially change the syntax for using regular expressions into something completely different.

This divergent syntax is why the team that developed Visual Studio 2005 shouldn't call it a regular expression engine, because people like me who use the traditional syntax spend hours staring at the screen wondering what the hell they've been doing wrong all day, when the only thing they did wrong was assume regular expressions in Visual Studio follow the standard syntax.

Bastards.