Related
In my VS2008, suddenly, I can use just letters, no enter, space, delete, backspace, or any other keys.
Any advice how to fix this?
Keyboard is working perfectly in other applications.
Thanks.
I was having this problem several times a day. Make sure the Language setting is set to "Same as Microsoft Windows" under Tools -> Options -> Environment.
ReSharper Options - Environment - General - Clear Caches solved problem.
Close the document that you are working on and reopen it. It works for me when my keyboard seems to be not functioning and i can't type into the current form.
For me the only thing that worked is this solution in this link => https://superuser.com/a/1626086/1055404
Just go to tools -> options -> Environment -> Keyboard and click on reset button on the top right corner
Try to remember line number (better ;) ), close the file you want to modify, then re open it.
It happening sometimes to me and that "hack" works perfectly.
It is realy strange behaviour, in my case even the restart of windows was not helpful. the trick was for me to open the project using "File" menu in VS and then open the .csproj not
.sln file.
Disabling Productivity Power Tools and restarting the IDE worked for me.
Should not that it was very shortly after installing Resharper that the problem occurred, having never experienced it before.
It happens to me when I'm close to run out of RAM. Closing processes (not VS) makes keyboard usable again.
I work under a Virtual Machine, On my case I had to close and open the VS again.
Have you been comparing changes before a push/commit? Check if you have any modal windows open. Had the same problem and when I tried to close VS17, it warned me, that I had a modal window that prevented some user inputs. I pressed "ok" to the window, restarted VS and I could again do inputs. I had the exact same error as you - could insert letters, but couldnt fx delete, "end", "home" etc.
I had the same issue with Visual Studio 2017. I was not able to remove code after typing. I just close the Visual Studio and run as administrator. Its working fine for me.
Set another keyword mapping scheme in the
Tools - Options - Environment - Keyboard
Look at your keyboard shortcuts and make sure there isn't anything set to any of the keys you're trying to use. This happened with me when I installed an extension and messed with some keyboard shortcuts and inadvertently set settings sync to 'c' no matter where it was input.
Close vertical or horizontal group.
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 was searching for]", Subfolders, Find Results
1, "Entire Solution" No matching text found to look in. Find was
stopped in progress.
Why does it suddenly say "No files were found to look in"?
I've found a number of links on Google that say to press Ctrl + Break or Ctrl + Scroll Lock, but none of them seem to work for me.
I get that problem once in a while. One seemingly nonsensical solution I've found is to click inside the Find Results window (not the Output window). Once the blinking text cursor is visible, hit Ctrl+Break four or five times. This seems to "unblock" whatever causes the problem.
There are reports Ctrl + ScrLk may need to be used instead of Ctrl+Break . If these doesn't work then try Break alone.
Note from Codeguard: I have found an explanation and deterministic solution to this problem
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...
Bug source
This is neither Visual Studio nor Windows related bug. In fact, the bug is in your keyboard! Many keyboards from different vendors have been reported to be buggy.
Problem
If you press Ctrl+Break and release Ctrl first, then Break gets stuck on a buggy keyboard. If you ever pressed Ctrl+Break the "wrong" way, you will have this problem with search being interrupted.
Details
According to scan code specifications, Break and Ctrl+Break are special. They send "make" (press) AND "break" (release) scan codes the moment you press Break. They send nothing when you release Break. The buggy keyboard will send the following sequence:
Ctrl "make" scan code
Ctrl+Break "make" scan code
Ctrl "break" scan code
Pause "break" scan code
That is, Ctrl+Break is never released, but instead Pause is released.
Reproduction
You could for example use old good Spy++ from Visual Studio tools. Attach it to anything, for example Windows notepad, and monitor messages (I suggest that you select only keyboard messages). Press Ctrl+Break, releasing Ctrl first. Check the output from Spy++. You will see the sequence I shown in Details section.
I have tried two different keyboards on the same computer. Logitech K120 has the bug while some other Mitsumi keyboard behaves according to specifications and does not have the bug.
If you think about it, it's easy to understand that correct behavior needs special case handling, while buggy behavior is naive. This is why many different keyboards can be buggy.
Solution
Replace your keyboard :)
Workaround
You simply need to press Ctrl+Break, paying attention to releasing Break first. It doesn't matter which application is active.
This bug has been in Visual Studio a long time and it never seems to get fixed.
See this MS Connect item from 2004: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/105511/find-in-files-says-no-files-were-found-to-look-in-find-was-stopped
I couldn't believe they still hadn't fixed it in VS2010 - but it's still there :(
The Connect item has been marked as Closed - Won't Fix: https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/718217/find-was-stopped-in-progress-while-performing-search-in-visual-studio
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.
Ctrl + F and Ctrl + Shift + F have stopped working on Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition.
My friend told me going to:
Tools → Import and Export Settings:
Choose: Reset all settings → Next
Choose: No, just reset settings, overwriting my current settings → Next
Choose: General → Finish
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
Search solution in Visual Studio 2012 is broke. I tested this on three machines, did not work on two. What I found which does work is click on drop down arrow next to search field and select Find all. This is a bit of pain because you have to select drop down every time you search in solution.
I tried all the previous options. They didn't work for me, but reading them made me sure that this is a bug, and I will have to try some unknown ways to get it working. So, I tried a simple file search in Visual Studio 2010 in:
The current document
All the open documents
Both of which worked.
Then I tried Find in Files and woah! It started working.
Unfortunately none of these special key strokes work for me. Only restarting Visual Studio 2010 seems to work for me.
I had the same problem in Visual Studio 2013 (Update 3). None of the key combinations listed previously worked for me. I had *.cs selected in the FileTypes.
To get it working, I changed it to *.*, and then back again to *.cs - now it works.
I have been using Visual Studio 13 without this problem for couple of years now and I started having this issue after applying Update 5 or it could be a weird keys combo pressed by me unknowingly which triggered it, I don't know for sure.
Echelon_Force's solution worked for me. Thanks!
Didn't Work:
Ctrl + Break
Ctrl + Scroll Lock
Worked:
Break (in Find Result 1 & 2 window - Only pressed once)
Happy finding in files!
All of the combinations of Scroll Lock and Break didn't do anything for me. As a workaround, I added the solution directory to the Search Folders (the second ellipsis button), then changed the Look In field to the solution directory. The root problem still exists, but for me, this is functionally the same thing.
(Visual Studio 2013, Windows 8.1, x64)
I was using Visual Studio 2022 (tried with both professional and community, V 17.2.5), my search function was not working in Find in All Files, so I browsed to my solution folder, under .vs\{ProjectName} folder, there is another folder with name FileContentIndex. After closing visual studio and deleting this folder, and restarting vs, seemed to solve my problems, and my Find in All Files started functioning correctly.
I had the same problem as glenneroo today, after updating Visual Studio 2019 to 16.4.3. Found a solution that worked for me here.
Open Find Options and check if there is a (special) character in the Look at these file types text field. If so, remove it.
In Visual Studio 2013 after Update 3, I had the same problem. Before, I could just put ".cs" or ".cshtml" in the Look at these file types: and it would work. But after Update 3 I now have to put ".cs" or ".cshtml" (or whatever file types I want to search in) and it works fine.
This works for me after everything else didn't or worked only sometimes:
Do the search, and while searching, hold CRTL all the time and keep pressing Break.
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.
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.
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!
It only seems to lock-up if I use Ctrl + F (Find in Entire Solution) and never if I use Ctrl + Shift + F (Find in Files).
That Ctrl+Break trick worked for me for years, it's really interesting to finally understand why this happens. With VS2015 I have somewhat related problem with search: my Ctrl+Shift+F simply does not work, this key combination seems to be ignored when I press it. I tried to reinstall even VS 2015 and I still got that same broken behavior.
In case somebody has identical problem, here's what was the reason:
I turns out that for whatever random reason VS2015 shows that "find in files" dialog on another monitor that's attached to my PC. That other monitor is 4K Samsung TV that normally stays "Off" and I have no clue why VS 2015 sends that search dialog box to that monitor. Surprisingly, when I turn on my TV the search dialog moves to the primary monitor on its own!
Ctrl + Break works for Visual Studio 2008
Nothing worked for me. I use also Resharper. So I had to reset my VS key bindings and reapply Resharper shortcuts. Only this got me it working.
Reset current keyboard configuration (Tools | Options | Environment | Keyboard | Reset).
Go to ReSharper | Options | Environment | Keyboard & Menus | "Visual Studio" | Apply Scheme.
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 )
Tried all the solution, but the fixed of mine was I accidently change to another language keyboard on my windows, after I change back to English keyboard, it work, finally I can ctrl + shirt + f
I'm currently using VS2019 16.7.7, and, if I try to find something in the whole solution, VS never finds all the occurrences, sometimes only one, or none.
In some recent release of VS2019 (perhaps 16.5 or 16.6) the old "Find and replace" dialog was replaced by a new "Find in files" dialog, and this new one is failing for me. One solution that worked for me was to disable the new "Find in files" and keep using the old "Find and replace" dialog by checking Use previous Find In Files in Tools > Options > Environment > Preview features.
However, I observed that this was only failing in one of my open Visual Studio instances, so I tried the simple "close VS and open it again", enabled the new "Find in files" functionality, and it started working.
Two possible solutions, in case the simple "close and open again" fails.
The following worked for me. Visual Studio → menu Windows → Reset Window Panel. The resizing of Visual Studio made it to hide the option.
This was one of my biggest problems with Visual Studio. For me (Windows 10, Visual Studio 2015) the find in all files window got locked with a white-out, and guess what, hitting print screen solves it.
This has begun occurring for me with the update to Version 15.8.8 of Visual Studio. None of the above steps worked. There is no error. Just what appears to be a 'stuck' search.
I had recently installed ApexSQL Refactor 2018.03.0331. Uninstalling this did not resolve the issue and does not seems to be the cause. It seems to be related to Version 15.8.8 of Visual Studio update.
I completely uninstalled Visual Studio and reinstalled Version 15.8.8 again. The issue with Ctrl-Shift-F searching the Entire Solution is no longer an issue. Whatever caused the problem does resolve after uninstalling and installing.
I once again installed ApexSQL Refactor 2018.03.0331 and everything still works well.
In my Visual Studio instance, even if I just wrote a single line of return in a C# console application, it will take me a minute after pressing F5 to execute the actual code (I mean the time it takes to stop on the single return statement after pressing F5 -- I set a breakpoint on the return statement in the main function). What is wrong? Is there a check list?
I am using Visual Studio 2008 VSTS edition and debugging on Windows Server 2003 x64.
You may need to delete all your breakpoints---note that you need to click the "Delete all breakpoints" button (or use Ctrl + Shift + F9), NOT just delete them one by one. If Visual Studio has mangled your solution settings the latter will not work. You may need to add a breakpoint first, in order for this to work (clever, eh?).
If worst comes to worst, you may need to delete your .suo file and let Visual Studio start a new one from scratch. Note that you will lose your personal solution configuration settings, however (only for this solution, not any others). However, you may want to move/rename the file temporarily until you determine whether or not this is the problem; that way, you can always move it back. I have seen some online resources recommend deleting (moving/renaming) the .ncb file as well.
I have seen this before. Try deleting all your breakpoints and then set the ones you want. Hit F5. Is it faster now?
I just noticed that you mentioned setting up the .NET source debugging feature. Try to disable that. Your network connectivity to Microsoft's source server may be slow. Also disable any symbol server connectivity in menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.
Also try disabling "Enable property evaluation and other implicit function calls" in menu Tools → Options → Debugging → General.
Or remove your .suo file which can be found next to your solution (.sln) file.
This solved an issue I had with debug sessions taking a long time to start and stop.
I had this problem. After trying all the listed advice and removing all Visual Studio extensions, we finally figured out that somehow IntelliTrace was enabled. Disabling that fixed everything.
How to: Enable and Disable IntelliTrace
Do you have a lot of breakpoints set? Those can really slow down startup time. Everytime a new module is loaded into the process address space, they all need to be checked to see if they are valid.
Go to menu Tools → Options → Debugger → Symbols and check if you have public symbols set or UNC network paths set. Also check menu Tools* → Options → Debugger → General to see if you have source server set.
All of these can affect debugging based on slow network speed or unavailable servers. The 5 minute wait time is network timeouts.
If nothing in options is set, check to see if you have the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable set.
My colleague had a very slowly responding Visual Studio, and it literally took minutes to perform a step while debugging.
The root cause turned out to be an anti virus program (Threatfire) that went crazy while Visual Studio was running. Killing its process immediately fixed everything.
In my case changing the debug symbol "Automatically load symbol for" option from "All modules" to "Only specified modules" solved the problem. You can change this option from menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.
A different cause plus... How to find the problem
To me it was the option ShowOtherThreadIpMarkers. A value of 1 makes Visual Studio (2010) unbearably slow (3-5 seconds for each debug step. With a value of 0, it is fast again.
What is it that option? I have no idea. I could not find it through the Visual Studio user interface.
I unchecked all possible debugging options in there and nothing worked.
So I went to Import/Export Settings and loaded my old settings I've previously saved going backward in time until Visual Studio was fast again, then compared the vssettings files..., etc., etc.
I'd like to remark that if you load the settings while you are in debug mode stopped on a breakpoint, they become effective immediately. You don't have to stop the debugger and restart.
From ScottGu's blog linked by Travis: "One other performance gotcha I've heard about recently is an issue that a few people have reported running into with the Google Toolbar add-in. For some reason this can sometimes cause long delays when attaching the Visual Studio debugger to the browser. If you are seeing long delays with your web application loading, and have the Google Toolbar (or other toolbars) installed, you might want to try uninstalling them to see if that is the cause of the issue."
Running under the debugger for me was roughly 10x slower than running without debugging.
After trying every solution suggested here, I went through every debugger setting and enabled/disabled to see if it made a difference.
For me, it turned out that disabling Suppress JIT optimization on module load in the debug settings massively improved things.
Make sure you don't have any stale network mappings to servers that no longer exist (network timeouts will kill you). Or use something like Process Monitor to see if a network (or other file error) seems to be blocking for a long time.
Are you using a symbolsServer to download symbols for Windows DLL files?
If so, disable that as it can take some time, but I wouldn't expect that to cause long delays in a basic console application.
Menu Tools → Options → Debugging → Symbols.
I know this is an old topic, but for what it's worth...
I've found that if I've had a separate Internet Explorer window open for a long time it can take up to a minute to start debugging. Close all Internet Explorer windows and debugging starts immediately.
In my case Google Toolbar was slowing down my debugging.
gplus_notifications_gadget.html just kept going on and on overloading the debugger. I wanted to keep the Google Toolbar because I use it on a regular basis, so I just disabled the G+ notification button (the small button besides the profile button). It is happy now.
I had the same issue in Visual Studio 2010, with stepping in the code excruciatingly slow (between 3 to 10 seconds). However, none of the above settings modification did the trick.
I eventually found the ultimate solution, which would work in all of the above post issues: reset all your settings, as described here (essentially menu Tools → Import and Export Settings, Reset all settings, with saving existing settings to a file (for reverting)).
You may first want to save a particular part of your settings. For instance, I first saved my color theme (Solarized-like) and then restored it after the global reset.
For me, the setting that killed performance (Windows 8 even hanged except for mouse movement) was to uncheck "Break all processes when one process breaks" in menu Options → Debugging → General.
Just one more cause of a slow Visual Studio debugging experience...
Long time ago I enabled FusionLog to see what was causing an assembly binding problem.
Make sure you disable it after using it. Why? Because it writes a lot of logging data to the disk while enabled.
This is the FusionLog key on Window's Registry (regedit.exe):
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Fusion
Change the ForceLog, LogImmersive and LogResourseBindings values from 1 (enabled) to 0 (disabled).
I had this problem too, but it had nothing to do with breakpoints in my case. It was code shortcuts that I added in the tasks window:
http://www.customsoftwareframeworks.com/blog/longwaittimetoinsertoraddalineoftextbuginvisualstudio--tasklistwindow--onlywhenaddingandremovelines
I'm sure there are other ways you could see a problem like this, but there is a bug somewhere that caused this problem for me...deleting all my options would have fixed this, but that is something that I did not want to do. So, I debugged it and wrote about it in my blog...your problem sounds like mine.
Something that has worked for me is to make sure there are no conditional break points. Other than that, I have had success fixing slow debugging by simply restarting Visual Studio and only opening one instance of Visual Studio at a time.
I had a similar issue and none of the other guidance seemed to help. I had rebooted to no avail. I had removed all breakpoints, deleted the .suo file, checked that symbols weren't being loaded from external sources, and checked that no paths existed in the application that was unavailable.
Then, I thought to clean the solution. I noticed in the output window that C# IntelliSense reported an issue when cleaning:
There was a problem reading metadata
from
'{B0C3592F-F0D1-4B79-BE20-3AD610B07C23}'
('The system cannot find the file
specified.'). IntelliSense may not
work properly until the solution is
reloaded.
In this case, once you actually discover the error message, it tells you exactly how to resolve it. (Good job on the error text, poor job on discoverability!) I unloaded the solution's projects, then reloaded them. I was then able to successfully run clean solution. It worked, and the debugger did as well.
Closing the "Autos" window improved debugging for me in Visual Studio 2008 for a big native C++ solution.
Hiding it won't work. It needs to be closed.
I experienced the same slowdown and disconnecting from the network fixed the problem for me as some other comments and answers have stated (but of course that is not an ideal fix).
For my case this one simple change fixed my solution: In the project properties on the debug tab I disabled "Enable the Visual Studio hosting process" (I am running Visual Studio 2010).
Get more memory and a faster HD. More details are here.
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 "Find Results" window.
No files were found to look in. Find stopped progress
Once this message shows up, all the subsequent searches will result in the same message. Nothing fixes the problem including restarting the computer except pressing Ctrl + ScrLk.
What causes Visual Studio to get into this state and is there a setting to permanently prevent it from happening?
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.
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.
Apparently, for those for who the key combinations don't work (like me at the moment), deleting the following registry key brings salvation:
MyComputer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\[VS VERSION NUMBER]\Find
Of course, [VS VERSION NUMBER] should be internal version number of the IDE. Don't forget to restart your computer.
Mind you, deleting stuff in the registry is dangerous. Like anyone on SO cares but anyway...
I don't think there is anything you can do to prevent it.
It seems to occur after I have stopped a build with CTRL+Break...Maybe I am pressing CTRL+Scroll Lock during that time???
I have only had it happen to me 2-3 times, and that was several months apart.
What he is saying is that occasionally when performing a search within Visual Studio you get the mentioned error message. Even though you know there is stuff to find. It is some weird state that Visual Studio gets into. If you press the (CTRL+Scroll Lock) it will 'fix' the issue.
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.
I have had this problem and saw peoples' answers about the multiple Ctrl + Break/Pause Scroll Lock combinations.
I considered this, but I thought it a poor workaround (especially as I use a Mac Keyboard so those keys are not easily available).
So the solution I found was to do this:
Menu: Tools → Options → Environment → Find and Replace
Uncheck the top three check boxes (checked by default in my settings).
Re-check the top three check boxes.
Et voila, everything should work fine.
Well, it did for me anyway, which was a relief as I can't believe Microsoft would allow a weird key combination as a work around for a bug like this.
I submit this hoping it may help!
See if this Stack Overflow question helps:
Search stops working for "Entire Solution"
Short version of the solution:
You should try clicking inside the Find Results window, and once the blinking text cursor is visible, hit Ctrl + Break four or five times. That should do the trick.
My experience with this problem:
Steps to Reproduce
I just experienced this using Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard and Visual Studio 2010 SP1.
I was accessing Visual Studio remotely through Citrix Receiver (from my computer, A, to B) and through Windows Remote Desktop (from B to C). In this set-up (chaining two remote sessions), I sometimes have stuck modifier keys.
In B, I had pressed Windows+Pause to access the System Properties window. (This may or may not be related; I suspect there could have been a stuck key press or something.)
Later on, when I opened Visual Studio on C, I had this problem. Note that I always use Ctrl+Shift+F to access the Find All window.
Solution
I solved it by pressing Ctrl+Scroll Lock as suggested in other answers.
Cause
As for why this happens, I did notice that if I press Ctrl+Break while the text cursor is in the Find Results window but before any results are found then the search stops with the same message. This indicates to me that it's related to a keyboard problem.
As reported by others, apparently it's a Windows bug. Here's a discussion about this.
I encountered a very similar problem. I was searching a folder for all files for a phrase in all .cs files in my solution. Visual Studio kept saying "No files were found to look in". (It did not have the "Find stopped progress" part of the message.)
I searched for the message and found this question. The suggested keyboard commands in other answers did not work.
I like to use the keyboard for navigation. I had accidentally hit Alt+B and Space. Alt+B is the shortcut to jump to the "Include sub-folders" checkbox on the Find and Replace form. The space bar cleared the checkbox, and then Alt+A performed a Find All action. Because it was not searching sub-folders, no files were found. The message was correct.
After checking the "Include sub-folders" box, searches found the matching files in sub-folders. So if you're getting the message "No files were found to look in" without the message "Find stopped progress", ensure the search is looking in sub-folders!
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.
I had this in Visual Studio 2015 yesterday.
In Find in Files, in the textfield Look in:, I typed
*.*
instead of Entire Solution, and that also caused No files were found to look in.
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.
I can reproduce your issue.
There are some steps as following below you can try:
Check the setting Find and Replace (menu Tools → Environment → Find and Replace).
Open "Developer Command Prompt for VS2013" and paste
“devenv.exe /resetsettings”
Use the Visual Studio Setup Wizard (via Control Panel) to repair Visual Studio. You also can read the reference about Find in Files:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dechx2tz.aspx
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.
To be clear, Press Ctrl + ScrlLck, with the Search Window open. That resolved it for me too.
I still have to use the VB6 IDE.
Unfortunately every time I start the IDE one of the buttons of the toolbar disappears. Almost always it's the Run button which goes first. Sometimes also items from the menu bar or the context menus are missing.
I have to reset the toolbars almost every time I start the IDE (Which is quite often during a typical work day). Recently I bought an IDE plugin which modifies the menu bar and requires a restart after every reset of the menu bar. (Otherwise it would crash)
I could live with just the resetting, but the restart is really annoying.
Is there something I can do?
To solve this problem:
Unload all add-ins.
Right-click on a toolbar and select the Customize... menu.
For each toolbar click the Reset... button (6 times in total).
Reload the add-ins.
For me action 3 was enough.
cf. MZTools faq (thanks to Andrea Bonafini), but these steps are originally from MSDN
It sounds like you recently bought a bad add-in. Can you get your money back? Every time I've had problems with disappearing controls in the IDE it has been due to a bad add-in. You can find out which one it is by disabling them, one by one, each time using the IDE for a while, then re-enable it and disable the next one, until the problem stops.
I still use one problematic add-in. It exhibits behavior similar to yours in that it makes the run button disappear. I avoid the problem by only loading the add-in when I need it, use it (it formats code), then I immediately unload it. If you don't use the functionality of the add-in that often, this could be an acceptable workaround.
Yea, i have this same problem with one of the add-in. But if you reset it. Shut the IDE down and open it back up again without doing anything, the IDE shouuld be able to retain the previous clean setup.
It's just guest, but:
Each graphical element on IDE (like button) is kind of resource (i.e. GDI handle).
Maybe your VB app doesn't manage these resources good enough and after sometime VB IDE cannot redraw elements like buttons (run is used often).
Also, maybe some IDE add-in is in conflict with some other add-in/application and breaks something -- I have this problem with Clip-X and MZ-Tools.
I had a similar problem when I was setting up the IDE to use for the first time, though it may not be helpful if you've been using the same IDE for a while. When I first started using the IDE, I would modify the toolbars and then close the IDE. When prompted if I wanted to save the open file I always said No, since the file was just a dummy file I was using to open the IDE with. Turns out the IDE was saving the toolbar preferences with that file, so they never got saved.
Try opening a file, customizing the UI, saving the file, then closing without modifying the code. This was the solution for me.
I've tracked down the problem and as suggested it was an add-in.
The problem went away as soon as I disabled the Visual Basic 6 Resource Editor.
How to restore your VB6 IDE without reinstalling:
Run Regedit
Find the entry for Visual Basic 6.0
Export your settings in case things
go wrong
Delete the 'UI' setting
Run VB and you will have your popup
menus back
The 'Find' button disappeared from my VB6 toolbar forcing me to select the Edit menu to use Find. I had two add-ins enabled: vbCodePrint and ResourceEditor; so I did away with both of them, turned VB6 off and back on, then put both add-ins back in and my button returned.
If you're still using the VB6 IDE, and I do amongst others, then this problem is not likely to have gone away. I use VB6 in Windows 10, and the problem is still there. But it doesn't affect me anymore.
I have had this problem a few years into using VB5 and VB6. Today, if I start VB6 directly, it may work fine the first time, but buttons will go missing the second time -- ALWAYS.
My solution, which I developed from day one:
Do whatever needs to be done to restore all your buttons. Save the Visual Basic 6.0 registry settings to a file, as suggested previously, and only keep the UI entry. Sometimes, you have to exit VB6 for it to post changes to the registry. So if this doesn't work the first time, try exiting before saving the settings.
I use my own program to launch VB6, which automatically copies my VB6 registry backup back into the registry -- by calling "RegEdit.exe /S D:\VB\IDE_Fix.reg" -- before I launch the IDE . This works every single time, and requires no action on my part.
If you read this, that means you are a programmer. You can make this work by yourself.
Mike
Reinstall,clean registry and update with SPacks etc....