title: How to create an empty folder on build in Visual Studio 2010?
body: <p>I have a VS2010 project which needs to create a <em>dataIn</em> and a <em>dataOut</em> directory in the <em>bin\debug</em> directory to allow some tests to run.</p>
  
  <p>Creating the <em>dataIn</em> directory is easy - just add the folder with the contents to the project and set the "Copy To Output Directory" property for each of the files it contains to "Copy always" (or edit the project file to use a wildcard to catch all files, as suggested by other answers on SO) - the directory will be created automatically by VS so that the files can be copied into it.</p>
  
  <p><strong>My question:</strong> how can I ensure the <em>dataOut</em> directory is created automatically when needed?</p>
  
  <p>There are no files to go in it, so there is nothing for this directory in the ItemGroup. If I add an entry for the directory to the project file by hand then I get the error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"&lt;path&gt;\dataOut" is actually a directory.  The "Copy" task does not support copying directories.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>(edit: removed underscores from the directory names so the italics would work!)</p>