We are testing a fix for the “closing tag problem” bug, but it will still take some time to deliver the fix to customers. The work-around posted earlier will alleviate the problem now and should not need to be undone once the fix is shipped.

This bug has actually been in the product for several release, but was previously hidden by another bug. When you begin typing an HTML tag, an Intellisense completion list is displayed. The earlier bug was that this list blocked keystrokes bound to commands from firing. An obscure command, “AutoCloseTagOverride” was bound to the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Period in the HTML Editor. It turns out that this is also fired by the key combination AltGr+Period.

So, in Visual Studio 2012, this command began firing when users typed the closing “>” of an HTML tag on the ten specific keyboards listed in the previous post, which cancelled the insertion of the closing tag whenever an opening tag was typed.

Clearly this was a test hole. Automated tests failed to simulate the problem and manual testing missed this area of risk. Test coverage has been corrected and this won’t occur again.