Visual Studio 2013 Search Solution Explorer fails to find files

Ian Oxley picture Ian Oxley · Feb 12, 2014 · Viewed 10.1k times · Source

So, I was using Visual Studio 2013, it crashed, and when I restarted it the Search Solution Explorer had stopped functioning correctly:

  • It fails to find any file if you type in the exact file name
  • It fails to find any static files e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.
  • It fails to find any configuration files e.g. Web.config

It seems to still find some files on a partial match, but not all files that you'd expect it to match e.g. if I search for Account I'd expect it to find AccountController.cs and AccountControllerTest.cs but it only finds the latter.

Some further info:

  • If I start VS 2013 in safe mode Search Solution Explorer works fine without any problems
  • If I manually disable or uninstall the extensions I'm using and start VS normally, the problem with Search Solution Explorer reappears

Has anyone come across anything similar to this, or got any suggestions of what to try to get Search Solution Explorer working again?

Update

I've had some joy running devenv /ResetSkipPkgs and devenv /ResetSettings. After a I ran those command Search Solution Explorer started working again, and works most of the time now. It still fails occasionally. Sometimes restarting Visual Studio will get it working again, but sometimes it just plain refuses to find certain files that are there.

Update 2

I installed Visual Studio 2013 Update 2, and Search Solution Explorer ran without any problems for just over a week before this problem reappeared. Restarting Visual Studio got Search Solution Explorer working again.

Answer

Grahame A picture Grahame A · Feb 19, 2014

I was able to narrow this down to the extensions I was using, "Productivity Power Tools 2013" seems to break the search feature for me in IIS, so I've disabled it for now. I'm getting a full set of results when searching now.

I came to this conclusion by uninstalling all of my extensions and reinstalling them one by one until the problem reappeared.

A coworker also had some success with this solution, launching DevEnv.exe with /ResetSkipPkgs

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241276.aspx

Update

The problem returned for me after about 30 minutes, no specific cause noted. It was nice while it lasted. Removing all extensions gets me the same behavior as OP, only running in safe mode appears to work.

Deleting the .suo file also seems to fix the problem for a while, and then it comes back. I'm about to resort to a reinstall of vs2012 just to get this search feature back.