Cannot Evaluate The Item Metadata "%(FullPath)"

This is a post from the archives. I wrote this a very long time ago and it ended up getting referenced on Stack Overflow 3 years later. This post is what made me fix the link rot I had created in 2016.

See more archived posts in the archives.

When building a web service in Visual Studio, I kept getting this build error:

Cannot evaluate the item metadata "%(FullPath)".
The item metadata "%(FullPath)" cannot be applied to the path "bin\Debug\Native.[...].manifest".

It turns out I was exceeding the limitation of 260 characters (MAX_PATH) in a file path. Moving the solution to a root directory fixed the error and let the service compile.