Question

We recently upgraded our website project to Visual Studio 2010.

I am now getting this error whenever I try to Publish the Website with the “Allow this precompiled site to be updatable” checked.

This worked previously using Visual Studio 2008 so I am not sure why it is not working now.

The type or namespace name 'xxxxxxxxx_ascx' does not exist in the namespace 'ASP' 
(are you     missing an assembly reference?)

The lines causing the error are all doing this sort of thing.

ASP.content_Controls_Info_ascx infoControl = new ASP.content_Controls_Info_ascx();
infoControl.Stages =  query.ToList();
PlaceHolder1.Controls.Add(infoControl);

I have not upgraded anything else so the dot net framework is still 3.5

The site builds fine and a publish works without “Allow this precompiled site to be updatable” checked. The content_Controls_Info_ascx part of the code also highlights the class name so it is finding it.

Answer 1

In .sln file find section related to your Web Site Project. It looks like this:

Project("{E24C65DC-7377-472B-9ABA-BC803B73C61A}") = "YourWebProject", "..\WEB\YourWebProject", "{A3774FE1-AA19-4A0F-94C9-FA58084B2429}"
    ProjectSection(WebsiteProperties) = preProject
        TargetFrameworkMoniker = ".NETFramework,Version%3Dv4.0"
        ProjectReferences = "..."
        Debug.AspNetCompiler.VirtualPath = "/YourWebProject"
        Debug.AspNetCompiler.PhysicalPath = "..\WEB\YourWebProject\"
        Debug.AspNetCompiler.TargetPath = "PrecompiledWeb\YourWebProject\"
        Debug.AspNetCompiler.Updateable = "true"
        Debug.AspNetCompiler.ForceOverwrite = "true"
        Debug.AspNetCompiler.FixedNames = "false"
        Debug.AspNetCompiler.Debug = "True"
        Release.AspNetCompiler.VirtualPath = "/YourWebProject"
        Release.AspNetCompiler.PhysicalPath = "..\WEB\YourWebProject\"
        Release.AspNetCompiler.TargetPath = "PrecompiledWeb\YourWebProject\"
        Release.AspNetCompiler.Updateable = "true"
        Release.AspNetCompiler.ForceOverwrite = "true"
        Release.AspNetCompiler.FixedNames = "false"
        Release.AspNetCompiler.Debug = "False"
        VWDPort = "2487"
    EndProjectSection
EndProject

and set following properties to “false” (I used Notepad to edit .sln file):

• Debug.AspNetCompiler.Updateable = “false“
• Release.AspNetCompiler.Updateable = “false“

by default they were set to “true” and error was occurred:

The type or namespace name ‘xxxxxxxxx_ascx’ does not exist in the namespace ‘ASP’
(are you missing an assembly reference?)

This solution helped me.