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

Windows 7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Visual Studio 9.0.30729.1

Didn't Work:

• Ctrl + Break
• Ctrl + Scroll Lock
• Restart of Visual Studio

Worked:

• Break (in Find Result 1 & 2) (only pressed once)

Source: Comments in Gordon's link...

Answer 2

I'm having a similar situation with Visual Studio Community 2017 and now 2019 (patched up to 16.1.4). In my case it doesn't show any results, it just searches forever without ever finding anything. My solution was to undock the "Find and Replace" dialog and move it to anywhere in a floating position. After undocking it seems to work fine, even after docking it again back to it's original position.

Answer 3

If you are searching for multiple file types, they must be separated with a ; character, not a space.

This returns the correct results:

*.cs;*.vb;*.js;*.aspx

This returns nothing at all:

*.cs *.vb *.js *.aspx

This isn't the problem the original poster, but for other people who can't figure out why their search isn't working, this could be the reason.

Answer 4

Ctrl+Break or Ctrl+ScrLk cancel a find operation. Try it. What has happened is that some software layer (presumably Windows) thinks those keys are still being pressed even though they are not. Pressing and releasing them clears the flag.

It could be any of these combinations:

Ctrl+Break

Alt+Break

Break

Ctrl+ScrLk

Remember that you have multiple control and alt keys on your keyboard -- try it with each of them. If it's the right Ctrl key + ScrLk, pressing the left Ctrl is not going to resolve the issue.

Here is the Connect issue which Microsoft closed as "Won't Fix".

If this is a recurring problem for you, there is a Visual Studio extension that suppresses the virtual key that causes the problem.