Quite randomly in the middle of a session, Visual Studio went bonkers and started saying “No files were found to look in. Find was stopped in progress.” whenever I tried to search for anything.
Visual Studio being what it is (a buggy but widely used tool), I went to Google. And Google delivered: the solution is to press Ctrl + Scroll Lock. Huh? As a fix that’s on par with spitting over your left shoulder on a Thursday with a full moon.
And if that wasn’t weird enough, the bug has existed in the last 3 (three) versions of Visual Studio: 2003 and 2005 and 2008 (which we use). And no one at MS has bothered to fix it.
I found this most curious, so did some poking around myself. Apparently, it’s not specifically a VS bug, but an OS oddity with the GetAsyncKeyState API that seems to have originally surfaced with Windows 2000. So it potentially could affect any application that uses that sort of Find dialog. A bit more explanation is found in the discussion following this report: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=180537&wa=wsignin1.0
Another MS rep says that they are hoping to address the problem in some future OS release, but didn’t specify whether that might be in patches to existing OSes, or in future Windows versions.
Thanks for finding this — now I have something new for my weird MS trivia file. ;)
Aha, interesting! Thanks Laura. This, in turn, led me to the ever-useful The Old New Thing which explains this in even more detail.
(Every now and again I find some really fascinating tidbit on The Old New Thing and then I subscribe to it. And then I get weeks and weeks of minutiae about API functions I don’t care about, and I unsubscribe again. Months go by, I forget about it, and then inevitably I find something interesting there again…)