VB Visual Studio doesn't update the bin/debug folder

Question

A friend was working on a Visual Basic program in Visual Studio 2010 (Express) and all of a sudden, after the code is changed or the form is modified, Visual Studio refuses to update the program when we go to debug/build it. It doesn't update the "MyAppName".exe at all.

I tried following the accepted answer to this question, which suggests deleting all the content in the bin/debug/ folder, but when I try to build his program, it simply repopulates these files:

• MyAppName.vshost.exe.config
• MyAppName.exe.config
• MyAppName.vshost.exe

(I made sure I had closed VS prior to deleting, so that all the files were removed.)

If you press F5 or the debug button, VS complains:

Visual Studio cannot start debugging because the debug target 'C:\PATH_TO_PROJECT\bin\debug\MyAppName.exe' is missing...

and so on.

Any help?

Answer 1

Here are the steps in VS2010:

Step 1: Build -> Clean Solution This will delete all the build output files

Step 2: Build -> Rebuild Solution Rebuilds everything. Note: Build solution only builds the projects that Visual Studio determines need to be built (which is why you are not seeing all files updated). Visual Studio gets this wrong sometimes.

You can check to see if you are build configuration via Build -> Configuration Manager.