“Could not load type [Namespace].Global” causing m

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.

Answer 3

I restarted Visual Studio and error was gone!

Answer 4

Old post but I go this error when trying to convert from website project to web application project.

Follow the instructions on this Link. I still got the global.asax error but all I did was delete it and re-add it back by right clicking on the project in visual studio and selecting add new item. Add the global.asax file and it worked.

Answer 5

Check the Build Action of Global.asax.cs. It should be set to Compile.

In Solution Explorer, Right-click Global.asax.cs and go to Properties. In the Properties pane, set the Build Action (while not debugging).

It seems that VS 2008 does not always add the .asax(.cs) files correctly by default.

Answer 6

When I encountered this problem most recently I tried everything mentioned here but to no avail. After tearing my hair out I decided to try deleting my entire code base (yes, pretty desperate!) and then re-downloaded everything from my code repository. After doing this everything worked fine once more.

Seems an extreme solution but just thought I'd include it here as it hasn't been mentioned before in this thread.

(Note that the other time I have encountered this issue, is when the Global.asax was inheriting from a component which needed to be registered on the host machine. This was missing hence I got this same issue).

TL;DR; If all answers in this thread don't work for you, try deleting and then re-downloading your entire code base!