Search stops working for “Entire Solution”

Question

Somehow Visual Studio search has stopped working for me. Anytime I search \"Entire Solution\" for some text I get this result:

Find all \"[Whatever I

Answer 1

Another late-to-the-party answer, but I found yet another "solution" for this problem.

When it looks as if the Visual Studio app has frozen on search...leave it alone. Don't close it. Don't restart it. Just let it go for about 10-15 minutes and the problem may correct itself, as it did in my specific case. I'm not sure as to why leaving it alone solved the problem, although my wholly uneducated guess is that Visual Studio is building some sort of an index to be able to search files and running into a snag. Once the 10-15 minutes are up and VS completes its search, it seems fine after that.

Answer 2

Probably won't apply to most situations, but what fixed it for me was turning off 'Use Regular Expressions' in the search window. I had previously been using Regular Expressions for some tricky replacements and didn't turn off when finished. I think perhaps it was interpreting part of simple replace text (see below - had some special characters) as the start of an incomplete or malformed regular expression, and so couldn't actually do any matching. Would be nice if it told you!

Answer 3

Ctrl + Break works for Visual Studio 2008

Answer 4

Unfortunately none of these special key strokes work for me. Only restarting Visual Studio 2010 seems to work for me.

Answer 5

In my case I had a bogus character in the "Look at these file types:" field in the search window.

Removing the character solved the problem.

Visual Studio 2017

Answer 6

I am running Visual Studio 2012 Professional in a Virtual Machine, connecting using rdesktop from a Linux machine.

None of the other suggestions worked, but solved the problem was:

• Go to the 'Find and Replace' screen. (ctrl-shift-f in my case)
• Enter a search text and choose 'Entire Solution'
• Hit 'Find Next', it should find a result.
• Hit 'Find All', now works without aborting. (Note, i hit my Mouse really hard and some swearing was involved, too, but I don't think that has any relevance apart from a psychological one :D )