Saying that something should be stored in the bin\Debug folder is misleading. That folder is where VS places the output of the build process for a Debug build. You don't put anything there yourself. For a Release build, the output is placed in the bin\Release folder and you copy it from there to deploy it. If you have content files for your application then you can add them to the project in the Solution Explorer and set the Build Action
property to Content
and the Copy to output directory
property to Copy if newer
. They will then be copied to the output folder, wherever that may be, during the Build process and you can access them in code by referring to the program folder as the root path, e.g. Application.StartupPath
in WinForms. I'd probably suggest adding a folder to your project and adding the files under that. In that case, the folder will be copied to the output as well, so account for that in the path you use at run time.
Another option is to add the files to the Resources page in the project properties and then access the data using Properties.Resources
in code. Depending on the type of data, you may get an object that you can use directly or a stream that you can write to a file or an object. The main advantage of resources is that the user cannot edit or delete them as they can with separate files.