No DLLs/EXEs produced in the /bin when building in Visual Studio

Question

I'm not newbie in programming but run into some trouble that I can't fix for 2+ hours. I have a solution of 8 projects - 1 is ASP.NET Core (.net framework) web application, 7 are service libraries. All this worked fine until today.

I don't know what I did wrong - just was making some updates on controller actions etc as I've been doing many and many days before. After some point my solution stopped working at all. How it was:

• I noticed that after any changes in code breakpoints were no more working - just became disabled and never hit anymore. The solution however kept working with the old logic.
• I deleted all /bin and /debug folders and tried to restart application. All 8 projects were built well but only 7 of 8 produced DLLs/EXEs in the corresponding /bin folders. The main ASP.NET Core project reported it is OK but the /bin folder actually was empty. It couldn't start saying "Unable to start process .../bin/debug/net461/win7-x64/.exe. File not found".
• I opened a brand new VS instance and tried to create and run an empty default .NET Core project. After it was successfully built no files appear in its /bin folder again and it couldn't start saying same error message. I restored all VS settings to default, tried same project but it still didn't produce DLLs and EXEs.

What might have happened here?

Answer 1

Restart your machine... .NET Core Runtime might have a problem. Also you might have upgraded your nuget packages and not your .NET Core Runtime.

1. Announcing .NET Core 1.1
2. .NET Standard Library
3. Supporting multiple .NET framework versions