visual studio question

I'm currently working on a program for my foundations class. The program contains 2 .cpp files, and 1 .h file.

I made some incorrect changes to the 1 .cpp file that contained the methods for a class that I created; the changes caused the program to fail. (cannot find .exe)

After the changes were unimplemented the program continued to fail when I tried to recompile. I tried restarting visual studio and reopening the program but that didn't work; I continued to get that same fail message. The only thing that worked was restarting my computer.

Can anyone explain to me why that was happening? And what I can do to avoid this problem in the future?

post the code.

I had a similar problem with codeblocks, where I has trying to recompile the project but it was giving me "Access denied". It seems that because of my program's failure, it kept on running in the background. Since Windows refuse to change the file of a running instance, I had to go through process manager to shut it down.