For years, I have been a little annoyed every time I build an app and there are errors.

Well, of course, I'm annoyed that there are errors. But the other annoyance was that the Error List which shows Errors, Warnings and Messages never functioned properly.

Or so I thought.

And the problem was still there with VS2008, which made no sense to me.

So I decided it was time to pipe up about it. There's a place to do that, if you don't know. In the Visual Studio IDE's Menu is a tab called "Community" which has a selection for "Send Feedback". You can go in there and report issues with Visual Studio. You can also view existing issues and vote for them so Microsoft can prioritize them.

You need to search to see if your problem has already been submitted. I tried a number of filters and finally found my problem listed in a post titled When selecting tab in error list, previous tab does not deselect.

Amazingly, the issue was "Closed" with the final note of "by design".

By design?

Looking more closely, I learned that my intuition of how that UI works was totally wrong. I had always thought of the three blocks for Errors, Messages and Warnings as tabs. I expected that clicking on a tab would bring me to the correct "page" with the list I wanted to see. I just click madly on the tabs until I get what I want, but I never put two and two together.

They are not tabs, they are filter buttons. In this first screenshot, all three are selected.

There is only one page and one list. The buttons are for filtering that list.

In this screenshot, I have clicked the Warnings button to de-select it and now the warning is filtered out of the list.

That's not really very intuitive, but on the other hand I just accepted it for all of these years and never even thought to look into the documentation to see how it was supposed to work.

A lesson or two learned and hopefully a lesson or two shared!