Unable to start program, cannot find the file specified, Visual Studio 11

Question

I'm working off of a fresh install of VS 11 Beta, on a Windows 7 64-bit machine. When I try to debug, it gives me this error message.

"Unable to start program 'C:\Users\myname\documents\Visual Studio 11\Projects\Project1\Debug\Project1.exe"

I'm almost entirely sure it isn't a problem with my code--it works fine on online compilers, making me think that it's an issue with how I'm saving it. Just in case, here it is.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

int main(void)
{
printf("Hello, world!\n");
return 0;
}

My process for creating the project/file is to create a new empty Visual C++ project, then a .cpp file, write my code, save it as a .c inside of the first folder I'm prompted with, within the projects folder, and then try to debug.

What am I doing wrong, here? I know that the debug folder is empty, but I can't figure out how to create the .exe file that should reside in it.

NB: I'm rather new to programming. If answers could be phrased in babyspeak, that would be appreciated.

Solution

Well, there could be a number of things wrong. However, based on your description of making a ccp file and a c file, I'm betting that it's a problem in your VS 11 project rather than the code itself. My guess would be that either the c file didn't get included in your project (check the Solution Explorer) or that you have the main (or _tmain) function defined in both the cpp and the c files, which will make the linker issue an error.

There are a bunch of "Hello World" tutorials online for VS 2010 and earlier, but there don't seem to be many for VS 11 Beta yet. You may want to take a look at the 2010 versions. I found this video tutorial that you may want to check out.