Troubleshooting “program does not contain a static

Question

My MS Visual C# program was compiling and running just fine. I close MS Visual C# to go off and do other things in life.

I reopen it and (before doing anything else) go to "Publish" my program and get the following error message:

Program C:\myprogram.exe does not contain a static 'Main' method suitable for an entry point

Huh? Yes it does... and it was all working 15 min earlier. Sure, I can believe that I accidentally hit something or done something before I closed it up... but what? How do I troubleshoot this?

My Program.cs file looks like this:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Threading;

namespace SimpleAIMLEditor
{
    static class Program
    {
        [STAThread]
        static void Main()
        {
            Application.EnableVisualStyles();
            Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);

            Application.Run(new mainSAEForm());
        }
    }
}

...and there are some comments in there. There are no other errors.

Help?

Answer 1

Oke, I was looking at this issue as well. And in my case the solutions was too easy. I added a new empty project to the solution. The newly added project is automatically set as a console application. But since the project added was a 'empty' project, no Program.cs existed in that new project. (As expected)

All I needed to do was change the output type of the project properties to Class library

Answer 2

That's odd. Does your program compile and run successfully and only fail on 'Publish' or does it fail on every compile now?

Also, have you perhaps changed the file's properties' Build Action to something other than Compile?

Answer 3

I had this problem and its because I wasnt using the latest version of C# (C# 7.3 as of writing this) and I had to change the below internal access modifier to public.

internal class Program
 {
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        //My Code
    }
  }

or ammend the .csproj to use the latest version of C# (this way meant I could still keep the above class as internal):

<PropertyGroup>
    <LangVersion>latest</LangVersion>
    <NoWin32Manifest>true</NoWin32Manifest>
</PropertyGroup>

Answer 4

My problem is that I accidentally set the arguments for Main

static void Main(object value)

thanks to my refactoring tool. Took couple mins to figure out but should help someone along the way.

Answer 5

It is important that the Main method is placed in the class that is properly configured in Visual Studio as a start-up object:

• Right-click your project in project explorer; choose "Properties..."
• In the properties dialog, choose "Application" tab
• In the application tab, choose SimpleAIMLEditor.Program from the drop-down for your start-up object

Now run your application again. The error will disappear.