No files were found to look in. use Ctrl+Scroll Lock!

 

Credit goes to: http://blogs.ugidotnet.org/franny/archive/2005/12/08/31303.aspx

Today, one of my colleges ran into a problem. He click on "Ctrl + Shift + F" to open the Find and Replace dialogue, and he tried to find a string in his solution.

 

The text that he wants to search is right in front of his eyes, yet clicking on the Find All button only returns: "No files were found to look in.Find was stopped in progress."

He thought that he must be tired today.  Double check his spelling, his cap lock, and all other options. There it goes his 1/2 hr of work.  So, he came over to me to make sure that ensure that he is not hallucinating.  I said no, surely something is wrong with VS.

Another one of my colleges overheard our conversation, and said, "Try Ctrl + Scroll Lock".  WT..., how does Ctrl + Scroll Lock helps to solve this issue? Surprisingly, it worked!

The annoying part is that there is no explanation on how you get into to this state and how to fix it.  Obviously, no one will spend time continue investigate into this, because your main job is to develop your product and not debugging your development tools.

I suspect this maybe due some incorrect interaction between Visual Studio and the OS layer. The Scroll Lock button is rarely being used in modern software. In the past, when people still uses text-based UI, this button is used to make the arrow key to scroll the contents of the text window instead of moving the cursor.