title: Can't compile a CUDA program
body: <p>I've never programmed GPUs before, but someone gave me this CUDA code to compile. When I tried to do that in VC++ 2008 (CUDA toolkit 3.1), it gives me the following linking error. </p>
  
  <pre><code>LINK : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file '.\Release\main.cu.obj'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any idea what this error means and how to solve it?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong></p>
  
  <p>When I compile the files in the project, <code>main.cu</code> is not being compiled. I get this message</p>
  
  <pre><code>1&gt;"C:\CUDA\bin64\nvcc.exe"  --opencc-options -LIST:source=on  -ccbin "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin"  -D_DEBUG -D_WIN32   -I"C:\CUDA\include" -I"./" -I"../../common/inc" -I"../../../shared/inc"  -Xcompiler "/EHsc /W3 /nologo /Od /Zi   /MDd  " -maxrregcount=64 --ptxas-options=-v -gencode=arch=compute_13,code=\"sm_13,compute_13\"   --compile -o "Debug\main.cu.obj" "c:\Users\jan\Desktop\gpu\gpu\main.cu" 
  1&gt;nvcc Hâý(Ç=y░: Visual Studio configuration file '(null)' could not be found for installation at 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0/VC/bin/../..'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why is that so? I followed all the steps given by <a href="http://www.programmerfish.com/how-to-run-cuda-3-0-on-visual-studio-2008/" rel="nofollow">this site</a>.</p>