Visual Studio “Find” results in “No files were found to look in. Find stopped progress.”

Question

Sometimes while developing in Visual Studio IDE, when you use \"Find in Files\" dialog to find something, the search fails and you will see the following message in the \"F

Answer 1

Sometimes Ctrl + Break works, sometimes Alt + Break, sometimes Ctrl + Scroll Lock, and other times Alt + Scroll Lock.

Right now, nothing works. This has been a huge problem for me. Shame on Microsoft for not fixing this bug in the last nine years.

Answer 2

I have found another cause of this: Moving the solution folder to a new location, when CMake is part of the build process.

I was working with the Chromium Embedded Framework and moved the main CEF folder from e:\ to c:\ . This seems to break everything including Find because the CMake build scripts it uses hard-code the disk volume and full path (E:\folder) into the source paths.

Answer 3

I thought I was seeing this problem, but after two days of searching for a solution I figured out that the "Look at these file types" selector had changed and didn't include the file extension I needed.

Answer 4

This is not a Visual Studio bug or Windows bug. It's a keyboard bug. Please see an answer in duplicate question https://stackoverflow.com/a/28219093/147805.

Answer 5

According to this thread:

Posted by Microsoft on 10/13/2009 at 4:33 PM

Hi all,

Thank you for your continued interest in this bug. We have been able to reproduce the issue intermittently in several versions of Visual Studio running on several versions of Windows and have identified the root cause as external to VS. The Windows team unfortunately did not have time to fix this for their current release, but we are working with them to hopefully have this bug fixed for a future version of Windows. At present, the workaround (as many of you noted) is to press Ctrl+Scroll Lock, Ctrl+Break, or the Break key alone.

Again, thanks for all of the details you provided about this bug. If you have any further questions or comments, please feel free to post again here; although this issue was closed quite a while ago, I'll make sure it stays on our radar.

Thanks, Brittany Behrens Program Manager, VS Platform - Editor

This bug has been around since at least 2004 and, as of the above post in 2009, had not been fixed.

Answer 6

There are currently nine bugs on the Connect site related to this and marked as Not reproducible.

I created another one for Visual Studio 2010 SP1: "Find was stopped in progress" while performing search in Visual Studio

Please vote for it if you are unable to perform search.

PS: Microsoft claims that they fixed it in Visual Studio 2012.