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F5 not starting your Visual Studio Build?

I have to write this down, it is totally bizarre. A colleague come to me to ask why F5 wouldnt build his project any more.

Sure enough, pressing F5 showed the File/Open dialog, but Debug/Start on the menu worked perfectly. The green arrow toolbar button worked perfectly.

Any ideas?

Well, if this happened to you then I'm guessing you're using a Microsoft Natural Keyboard too. It has a goddamn "helpful" feature called the F-Lock key that remaps all your function keys to common windows features, like - you guessed it - File/Open. Press F-Lock and F5 will do a File/Open in whatever app has the focus.

This reminds me of the day when Visual Studio started being "helpful" with my markup. Remember that? Yeah, I'm sometimes not a big fan of "helpful".

Silly thing is, I've used a Natural keyboard for years and I didn't even know this key existed. I'm probably not going to be winning any "most observant" prizes any time soon.

Posted: Wednesday, December 16, 2009 3:23 PM by James
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