Visual Studio error messages can be quite misleading.

I got this error message while trying to build a C project with Visual Studio, and despite what the message suggests I had the right configuration / platform combination set up.

As it turns out however the project had some pre-build and pre-link steps set up, which failed because I removed the binaries (on purpose) that it wanted to run.

So for me the solution was just to remove those pre-build and pre-link steps as I didn’t need them anymore.