Error DEP1900 (Extremely Nasty) Appxrecipe file gone wrong!

Recently I was building one of my projects when suddenly my monitor had a complete meltdown giving off that one staticky screen you might see on a bad tv, even refusing to bluescreen. I restarted my computer and opened up my project again and to my displeasure a new bug had appeared.

Error: DEP1900: Cannot read the recipe file “C:\Users\HarambeCrompten\source\repos\KnockDownTest\KnockDownTest\bin\x64\Debug\KnockDownTest.build.appxrecipe”. InvalidProjectFileException - The project file could not be loaded. Root element is missing"

Frankly I didn’t have any idea what the heck a appxrecipe file was so I moved a jerk file somewhere and went to see if it would run (it did not) so I checked out what the file was. Trying to open the file it didn’t seem clear what to open it with but luckily sublime text worked and all I saw was a bunch of zeros

recipeErrorOne

So I decided to look in another MonoGame Project I had been using for learning (even though I still am learning… the basics… a lot) and Hurrah I found this

Now I don’t know for sure exactly what any of this mumbo jumbo is but I bet its important. I think I’m about a good 2-3 hours (maybe not sometimes that thought means its gonna be 2 days) from figuring out how to fix this in my solution but hey if anybody figures it out serious props to you! Probs good to document this cause when I looked up Error DEP1900 I didn’t find anything helpful.

I’ll post if I figure out how to re-create or somehow retrieve my old recipe file.

Found a solution c: !!!

After some experimenting I found that I needed to do a rebuild command in my terminal. This was after I copied the contents of my appxrecipe from an old MonoGame project I had to my new ones appxrecipe file. When I first did this it ran the old project from my new project to my amazement. I started changing the paths that were referenced in the new recipe file (the top ones mostly… if you need to do this just go one a time until you get the error I got (IF YOU NEED TOO)) then I got an error saying I needed to rebuild

this will show you what to type in terminal

You probably don’t even need to do any of the steps except that last one I mentioned to solve this. but…

WARNING!!!

when I did this it deleted my XML folder and my precious XML file that I had. (took me 10 minutes to make it again) so copy everything in your project and put it somewhere safe and cozy.