"Could not load type [Namespace].Global" causing me grief

Question

In my .Net 2.0 Asp.net WebForms app, I have my Global.asax containing the following code:

<%@ Application CodeBehind="Global.asax.cs" Inherits="MyNamespace.Global" Language="C#" %> 

However when I build I get an error stating-

Could not load type 'MyNamespace.Global'.

This seems to be because the MyNamespace namespace (defined in the code behind file Global.asax.cs) is not seen by the compiler in the Global.asax file (does not show in R# intellisence..). This turned out to be a very hard nut to crack... any help will be appreciated!

Note: The Global.asax and the Global.asax.cs are located in the same folder.

Note2: When compiling from the vs prompt with csc it compiles o.k.

Answer 1

One situation I've encountered which caused this problem is when you specify the platform for a build through "Build Configuration".

If you specify x86 as your build platform, visual studio will automatically assign bin/x86/Debug as your output directory for this project. This is perfectly valid for other project types, except for web applications where ASP.NET expects the assemblies to be output to the Bin folder.

What I found in my situation was that they were being output to both (Bin and Bin/x86/Debug), with the exception that some of the dll's, and inexplicably the most important one being your web application dll, being missing from the Bin folder.

This obviously caused a compilation problem and hence the "Could not load type Global" exception. Cleaning the solution and deleting the assemblies made no difference to subsequent builds. My solution was to just change the output path in project settings for the web app to Bin (rather than bin/x86/Debug).

Answer 2

Have you changed the namespace of your project? I've seen this happen occasionally where I've changed the namespace in the Project Properties dialog but Visual Studio hasn't changed the namespace declaration in existing code files.