Visual Studio 2010 error building, due to missing files

Question

I've searched everywhere and I can't seem to find anyone with the same problem (although I'm sure people have made the same mistake in the past)...I accidentally deleted the contents of my Debug and Release folders. Now I am getting file not found errors. As a background, it's a Windows Forms Application in C#, and I'm running Visual Studio 10.

Here's the errors:

Unable to read manifest 'bin\Debug\projectName.vshost.exe.manifest' 
Could not find file [pathName]\projectName.vshost.exe.manifest.

Before I was missing the manifest, I was getting an error that it could not find the other contents of the folder (the exe, the pdb, etc.), error MSB3113 (link)

Things I've tried (and some of them were far-fetched, I know):

• I tried renaming bogus files for all the missing files
• I tried to find the deleted files, but can't
• I tried deleting all the contents of the Debug/Release folders and doing a clean build
• I tried deleting the Debug/Release directories

Let me know if you can think of anything I could try out. My issue seems to be vaguely similar to this one.

Answer 1

Here's how I ended up solving the problem - turns out I included my bin and obj directories in my project. For anyone experiencing the same problem, simply right click and "Exclude From Project." After doing this, clean and rebuild your project, and you should be good to go.

Answer 2

In my case the file app.manifest was checked-out. This file is located in my Winforms project under Properties folder. I selected this file from Pending Changes window and did "undo pending checkout". After that the build succeeded. This happened in Visual Studio 2008.