Long hard-coded strings in a codebase can be a sign of poor architecture.
To make hard-coded strings easier to find, consider highlighting them in your IDE. Figure: Bad Example - The connection string is hard-coded and isn't easy to see in the IDE. Figure: Better Example - The connection string is still hard-coded, but at least it's very visible to the developers.Figure: Good Example - The connection string is now stored in configuration and we don't have a long hard-coded string in the code.