Razor HtmlHelper Extensions (or other namespaces for views) Not Found

Question

Since the Beta, Razor uses a different config section for globally defining namespace imports. In your Views\Web.config file you should add the following:

<configSections>
  <sectionGroup name="system.web.webPages.razor" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorWebSectionGroup, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35">
    <section name="host" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.HostSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" />
    <section name="pages" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorPagesSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" />
  </sectionGroup>
</configSections>

<system.web.webPages.razor>
  <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
  <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage">
    <namespaces>
      <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" />
      <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" />
      <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" />
      <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" />
      <!-- Your namespace here -->
    </namespaces>
  </pages>
</system.web.webPages.razor>

Use the MVC 3 upgrade tool to automatically ensure you have the right config values.

Note that you might need to close and reopen the file for the changes to be picked up by the editor.

As the accepted answer suggests you can add "using" to all views by adding to section of config file.

But for a single view you could just use

@using SomeNamespace.Extensions

I had this same error in an MVC 4 application using Razor. In an attempt to clean up the web.config files, I removed the two webpages: configuration values:

<appSettings>
  <add key="webpages:Version" value="2.0.0.0" />
  <add key="webpages:Enabled" value="false" />

Once I restored these configuration values, the pages would compile correctly and the errors regarding the .Partial() extension method disappeared.

I had this issue in VS 2015. The following solved it for me:

Find "webpages:Version" in the appsettings and update it to version 3.0.0.0. My web.config had

<add key="webpages:Version" value="2.0.0.0" />

and I updated it to

<add key="webpages:Version" value="3.0.0.0" />