receiving "error ASPPARSE: Could not load type ..." error with msbuild on MVC webapp

Question

We have CCNET and msbuild creating our regular builds. I am trying to update our process so msbuild creates zipped deployment packages and msdeploy sends them out to the target IIS7 web servers. I was having trouble doing the end to end solution, so for testing I'm trying to just call msbuild from the command line for now. I execute this statement:

msbuild /target:Build;Package /P:Configuration=Staging;OutDir=D:\Builds\Viper.ProdSupport\MSDeployPkg\ /verbosity:diagnostic D:\builds\ViperPortal.ProdSupport\Code\Viper\Viper.UI.MVC\Viper.UI.MVC.csproj

and I get this error:

/temp/global.asax(1): error ASPPARSE: Could not load type 'Viper.UI.MVC.MvcApplication'. [D:\builds\ViperPortal.ProdSupport\Code\Viper\Viper.UI.MVC\Viper.UI.MVC.csproj]

Oh, and for our specs: .NET4, MVC3, IIS7/Win2k8 64bit for web server. Build server is Win2k8 as well, but I'm testing the scripts locally on a win 7 32bit box with ccnet and a full dev config mgmt environment setup locally.

Does anyone have any ideas why I'm getting this error? I read some messages complaining about the aspnet compiler or changing where your bin deploys assemblies to, but none of those seemed to really apply here. I am simply trying to call msbuild, which has been working all along til now. We have a custom msbuild script for our solution. I tried using both that and the mvc csproj file as the build configuration file. Please help! Thanks!

Answer 1

this happens if you've set to precompile views, i.e. you changed:

<MvcBuildViews>false</MvcBuildViews>

to

<MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>

This is because MSBuild throws the output to different places than Visual Studio might, so you should change the folder on which the precompiling runs on from:

<AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)" />

to:

<AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(WebProjectOutputDir)" />