Question

Looking over some older code, I’ve run into a strange namespace error.

Let’s say I have two projects, HelperProject and WebProject. The full namespace of each – as given in application properties – is myEmployer.HelperProject and myEmployer.Web.WebProject.

The pages in the web project are full of statements that use classes from the helper project. There are no imports/using statements but there is a reference to the helper project added in the bin. A few example lines might be:

myEmployer.HelperProject.StringHelper.GetFixedLengthText(Text, "", Me.Width, 11)
myEmploter.HelperProject.Utils.StringHelper.EstimatePixelLength(Text, 11)

However every line that is written in this manner is throwing the error ‘HelperProject’ is not a member of ‘myEmployer’. If you declare the statements like this:

HelperProject.StringHelper.GetFixedLengthText(Text, "", Me.Width, 11)
HelperProject.Utils.StringHelper.EstimatePixelLength(Text, 11)

Everything seems fine.

In the solution object browser and the bin folder, HelperProject appears with its full namespace, myEmployer.HelperProject.

I don’t want to have to change all the statements, and besides I suspect this is masking a more fundamental problem here. But I have no idea what’s going on. Can anyone offer any pointers please?

Cheers,
Matt

Answer 1

Have you got a namespace clash, is myEmployer a class or sub namespace of the namespace where the call is being made. Try changing on of the references to the following format:

global::myEmployer.HelperProject.StringHelper.GetFixedLengthText(Text, "", Me.Width, 11)

Edit:

If you add the below using statement it will should remove the ambiguity by telling the compiler that in the context of this class myEmploye. means global::myEmployer and not any other class or namespasce called myEmployer.

using myEmployer = global::myEmployer;