Visual Studio creating bin/ folder in wrong location.

Question

In Visual Studio 2008, I have a solution with a number of projects. Each project has the same build output path of "..\bin\Debug\" for debug, and "..\bin\Release\" for release.

So the directory structure looks like this:

solution\
    bin\
    project1\
    project2\
    project3\

This all works fine, all the assemblies go to the correct location when I build the project, etc.

Howevever, when I first open the solution in Visual Studio, an empty bin folder is created one level up from where it should.

So I am getting:

bin\
solution\
    bin\
    project1\
    project2\
    project3\

This folder is only created when I first open the solution. Never when I build.

I have looked through the .sln and every .csproj file, and I cannot work out why this folder is being created.

So, my questions are: a) Why is this bin folder being created? b) How do I stop Visual Studio from creating this bin folder?

Answer 1

I noticed following behavior:

a) if path is '..\bin\' then wrong folder on wrong level gets created b) if path is '...\bin\' then all is fine (no garbage folder), but if you will touch setting VS automatically will change path to '..\bin\' and garbage appears again

Answer 2

Update - 30 September 2010: Upgrading from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2008 (Service Pack 1) completely resolved this issue.

This unusual behavior was occuring because I had 'XML documentation file' selected in the project build properties. Unchecking 'XML document file' stopped the empty bin folder from being created. Still no idea why this was happening, because the XML documentation file location was set to the same path as the assembly output path, but no matter what I did, as long as 'XML documentation file' was checked, I would always end up with an empty bin directory one level up from the actual bin folder.