Urgent help needed - beginner programmer

[mbdio]

Hey, I urgently need help with something...

I've got a mini-project to do and for it I am making a text game in C#, it was going well until I published it from Visual Studio and then tested out my saving and loading system. I can save/load the game perfectly within the development environment, by reading and writing to text files, but now I have the problem that when the application is published it can't find the files. I don't know where to put them or how to make it so the application can find them. Can anybody help me? It would be greatly appreciated.

P.S Simple is better, the only programming I know is the basics of VB, Java and C#. A tiny bit bit of C++. I'm only a beginner.

[eclipsed4utoo]

how are you publishing? A Setup & Deployment project in Visual Studio? Click-Once? Some other way?

[nelo]

How are you save/load the files in the development environment? That should give you an indication of how you would do it any environment. How do you know that the deployed version can't find the files? Do you get an exception? The exception message or stack trace can provide a clue as to where it is looking for it. Generally one of the first places it will look is the directory where the application is running...