Today I needed to do a mass string replace in all files in a directory.  Years ago, I used to use BKReplacem.  Today I found FNR – Find and Replace, a free utility that worked great the first tiem I ran it.

At my current client, someone had created a BizTalk project a year ago, and called it NewABCApp. Now that I took it over, I wanted it to be called just ABCApp. With BizTalk, the namespaces get embedded deep everywhere, in schema, maps, orchestrations, etc…  It’s a real chore to change the code by hand.

I found this great tool: FNR.exe on CodePlex.  It downloads a .exe, you run it, enter your directory, old text, new text, various options and press run.  (Make sure you have checked out your code first; if it’s locked down by TFS or your source code control system, that might prevent the update.)

The tool can also be run from the command-line by adding various parms.

The source code is also available; it was written in C# by of EN Tech Solutions and coordinated by Eric Popivker.  It’s had over 32,000 downloads, and a rating of 4.5 out of 5.  It hasn’t been updated since May 2014, but that’s likely because it just works.