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The "No files were found to look in." saga continues...
Date: 25/6/2008
Visual Studio 2002, 2003 and 2005 all have a delightful little bug where sometimes the keyboard state can get messed up so that find in files stops working with the error message:

No files were found to look in.
Find was stopped in progress.


Which I've blogged about before. The commonly held solution is to press Ctrl+Scroll Lock and everything is dandy again.

Well until yesterday that is. Where upon that error message appears in my Find Results pane. I dutifully look up the key press on my own blog (who remembers these things?) and press the key combo. And...? Nothing. Still the same error. Huh?

So back to dearly beloved Google, and I'm searching around. And ran into an alternate solution.

Yes, a different key combo.

For the same problem.

*sigh*

I present to you: Alt+Pause/Break.

Yes... believe it. If the first combo doesn't work, try the 2nd. I suspect by now there are "n" different combos that might need to be invoked to pacify the raging Visual Studio, and that getting you hooked on Ctrl+Scroll Lock is just a gateway drug to a whole swath of arcane key combos that you have to know. I expect that this would make a good interview question.

Previously.
Comments:
Jackie Liu
04/07/2008 1:03am
Yes, I've ran into these issues before. I just randomly press alt+pause and alt+scrolllock, until I can do search again. One of them will work.

This is caused by control+break during build.
enry
09/07/2008 10:44pm
What I am really interested in knowing is how the hell this persists a close / reopen of visual studio. It must be lower level, somewhere in the OS, but then, why on EARTH would everything else still run fine, but not VS file search?
fret
10/07/2008 2:15am
enry: Yes, the state is held in the keyboard state table that the OS manages. Pressing the right keys resets the key states and everything is fine again. The problem lies both with the OS getting the state wrong and with Visual Studio relying on it to be right. You'd think that they could check the keyboard state at the start of a find and look for a change, or reset it there... or something. Code around the issue instead of blaming the OS. It's all the same company, you'd think they'd talk to each other.
Ben Glancy
22/08/2008 1:02pm
You have to laugh when it works. Thanks for this bug fix. It was driving me up the wall.
 
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