"The referenced component could not be found" - c#

I'm attempting to build this project: https://github.com/Draco18s/NovelAPI/tree/9f99af461e4161ed4ba95e4721ec4b35cfd00ff2
But I've been stuck on a brick wall where none of the references for NuGet packages are working. I've got all the packages downloaded, I can see them in the package manager window and even see them in the project's directory. Despite this, the project itself just cannot find any of the packages and is throwing errors for all code involved. I added a bunch of screenshots to show what's going on.
I've been burning a lot of time on all of the solutions I can find online, but nothing is working. I haven't worked with NuGet very much so there's probably something obvious I'm missing and I figured I'll ask for help here at this point. Thanks everyone!
Broken references
Warnings
Nuget packages
Packages on my PC
Errors everywhere
Most solutions that I've been finding online hint towards there being something wrong with hard coded paths. But fixing that in the project settings did nothing either. As far as I can tell, all the dots are as connected as can be. But something has to be missing if the project is as broken as it is?
Reference paths do nothing either
I've also tried cleaning/rebuilding, pulling the project again, etc all the basics. Those did nothing either.
I'm using Visual Studio Community 2019 - 16.11.23

Related

How to resolve reference issues in Visual Studio [duplicate]

I'm getting a:
type or namespace name could not be found
error for a C# WPF app in VS2010. This area of code was compiling fine, but suddenly I'm getting this error. I've tried removing the Project Reference and the using statement, shutting VS2010 and restarting, but still I have this issue.
Any ideas why this might be occurring, where it seems like I'm doing the right thing re Reference & using statement?
I also noted in VS2010 that intellisense for that namespace is working ok, so it seems like VS2010 has the project reference and is seeing the namespace on one hand, but during compile doesn't see it?
This can be the result of a .Net framework version incompatibility between two projects.
It can happen in two ways:
a client profile project referencing a full framework project; or
an older framework version targeting a newer framework version
For example it will happen when an application is set to target the .Net 4 Client Profile framework, and the project it references targets the full .Net 4 framework.
So to make that clearer:
Project A targets the Client Profile framework
Project A references Project B
Project B targets the full framework
The solution in this case is to either upgrade the framework target of the application (Project A), or downgrade the target of referenced assembly (Project B). It is okay for a full framework app to reference/consume a client profile framework assembly, but not the other way round (client profile cannot reference full framework targeted assembly).
Note that you can also get this error when you create a new project in VS2012 or VS2013 (which uses .Net 4.5 as the default framework) and:
the referencing project(s) use .Net 4.0 (this is common when you have migrated from VS2010 to VS2012 or VS2013 and you then add a new project)
the referenced projects use a greater version i.e. 4.5.1 or 4.5.3 (you've re-targeted your existing projects to the latest version, but VS still creates new projects targeting v4.5, and you then reference those older projects from the new project)
Reinstalling nuget packages did the trick for me. After I changed .NET Framework versions to be in sync for all projects, some of the nuget packages (especially Entity Framework) were still installed for previous versions. This command in Packages Manager Console reinstalls packages for the whole solution:
Update-Package –reinstall
I've no idea why this worked, but I removed the project reference that VS2015 was telling me it couldn't find, and added it again. Solved the problem. I'd tried both cleaning, building and restarting VS to no avail.
When building the solution I was getting the same error (type or namespace ' ' could not be found). Below it I saw a warning stating that "the reference could not be resolved" and to make sure "the assembly exists on disk".
I was very confused, because my DLL was very clearly in the location that the reference was pointing to. VS didn't seem to highlight any errors, until I tried to build the solution.
I finally realized the problem (or at least what I suspect was the problem). I was building the library file in the same solution. So even though it existed on the disk, it was being rebuilt in that location (somehow in the process of the library getting rebuilt my other project - in the same solution - that referenced the library must have decided that the library didn't exist)
When I right-clicked on the project and built that only, instead of the entire solution, I didn't get the error.
To fix this problem I added the library as a dependency to the project that was using it.
To do this:
I right-clicked on my Solution in the Solution Explorer and selected
"Properties"
Then in "Common Properties" I selected "Project Dependencies".
Then in the Projects drop-down menu I selected the project that
relied on the library, and
Checked the box next to the library found under "Depends On"
This ensures that the library project gets built first.
First I would verify that your project's generated information isn't corrupt. Do a clean and rebuild on your solution.
If that doesn't help, one thing I've seen work in the past for designer issues is opening up a windows forms project, then closing it again. This is a little chicken-entrails-ish, though, so don't hold your breath.
A trickier situation I ran into was:
Project one targets the 4.0 full framework with Microsoft.Bcl.Async package installed.
Project two target the 4.0 full framework but would not compile when reference a Project one class.
Once I installed the Async NuGet package on the second project it compiled fine.
In my case, I find the reference in the VisualStudio have a triangle, and a exclamation mark as this image,
then, I right click remove it, and add the dll reference correctly again, the problem was solved.
I had a similar issue: The compiler was unable to detect a folder inside the same project, so a using directive linking to that folder generated an error. In my case, the problem originated from renaming the folder. Even though I updated the namespace of all the classes inside that folder, the project info somehow failed to update. I tried everything: deleting the .suo file and the bin and obj folders, cleaning the solution, reloading the project - nothing helped. I resolved the problem by deleting the folder and the classes inside, creating a new folder and creating new classes in that new folder (simply moving the classes inside the new folder didn't help).
PS: In my case I was working on a web application, but this problem may occur in different types of projects.
This one worked for me. In your class, where the class name is defined, eg: Public class ABC, remove one character and wait a little. You error list will increase because you have changed the name. Now put back the character that you have typed. This worked for me, hopefully it will work for you too. Good Luck!!!
[Facepalm] My issue was that I had added the dependency in the C++ way of doing things.
Go to the project that won't build, open up the 'References' folder in Solution Explorer, and see if your dependency is listed.
If not, you can 'Add Reference' and choose the dependency on the Projects tab.
Boom Shankar.
Check the Build Action of the .cs file containing the missing type. Make sure it's C# compiler.
Click on the .cs file containing the missing type.
Press F4 to bring up Properties.
Make sure Build Action is set to C# compiler.
Before:
After:
It even happens in Visual Studio 2017.
Restart Visual Studio
Clean project that fails to build.
Rebuild the project.
Had the same errors, my story was following:
after bad merging (via git) one of my .csproj files had duplicated compile entries like:
<Compile Include="Clients\Tree.cs" />
<Compile Include="Clients\Car.cs" />
<Compile Include="Clients\Tree.cs" /> //it's a duplicate
If you have a big solution and more than 300 messages in the errors window it's hard to detect this issue.
So I've opened damaged .csproj file via notepad and removed duplicated entries. Worked in my case.
I had same problem as discussed: VS 2017 underlines a class in referenced project as error but the solution builds ok and even intellisense works.
Here is how I managed to solve this issu:
Unload the referenced project
Open .proj file in VS ( i was looking for duplicates as someone suggested here)
Reload project again (I did not change or even save the proj file as I did not have any duplicates)
We had a weird case of this that I just fixed in a solution. There was a hidden/whitespace character in front of a "using" statement in the main project. That project would build fine and the website worked fine, but the unit test project that referenced it could not be built.
I encountered this problem when upgrading existing projects from VS2008 to VS2012. I found that two projects (the only two that I created) were targeting different .Net Frameworks (3.5 and 4.0). I resolved this on the Application tab of the projects by making sure that both projects had ".NET Framework 4" in the Target Framework box.
In my case I had a Class that was listed in the proper source folder, but was not registering in Solution Explorer. I had to do right click the project > Add Existing item and manually select that Class it said it was missing. Then everything worked fine!
I know its old, but I've found the same issue. My project did build, I then updated Visual Studio to the latest & the project wouldnt build as it couldnt find a type definition from a separate assembly. The other assembly built OK, the main project referenced it correctly & nothing had changed since it built OK.
I cleaned the whole solution & rebuilt it, it failed. I built the assembly on its own, it built OK. The project didnt build. I cleaned & built multiple times, and it failed. I then called a colleague to look at it, when I built with him watching, it all built OK.
I think Visual Studio tooling is the problem, especially as I just updated it.
In my case, I unload the project, then:
Opened myProject.csproj and update the ToolsVersion="4.0" to ToolsVersion="12.0"(I'm using vs 2017)(using Paulus's answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/64552201/1594487).
Deleted following lines from the myProject.csproj:
<Import Project="..\packages\EntityFramework.6.4.0\build\EntityFramework.props" Condition="Exists('..\packages\EntityFramework.6.4.0\build\EntityFramework.props')" />
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\$(MSBuildToolsVersion)\Microsoft.Common.props" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\$(MSBuildToolsVersion)\Microsoft.Common.props')" />
And the problem solved.
You might also try eliminating the code you think you're having problems with and seeing if it compiles with no references to that code. If not, fix things until it compiles again, and then work your suspected problem code back in. Sometimes I get strange errors about classes or methods that I know are correct when the compiler doesn't like something else. Once I fix the thing that it's really getting hung up on, these 'phantom' errors disappear.
I know this is kicking a dead horse but I had this error and the frameworks where fine. My problem was basically stating that an interface could not be found, yet it build and accessed just fine. So I got to thinking: "Why just this interface when others are working fine?"
It ended up that I was actually accessing a service using WCF with an endpoint's interface that was using Entity Version 6 and the rest of the projects were using version 5. Instead of using NuGet I simply copied the nuget packages to a local repository for reuse and listed them differently.
e.g. EntityFramework6.dll versus EntityFramework.dll.
I then added the references to the client project and poof, my error went away. I realize this is an edge case as most people will not mix versions of Entity Framework.
Adding my solution to the mix because it was a bit different and took me a while to figure out.
In my case I added a new class to one project but because my version control bindings weren't set I needed to make the file writable outside of Visual Studio (via the VC). I had cancelled out of the save in Visual Studio but after I made the file writable outside VS I then hit Save All again in VS. This inadvertently caused the new class file to not be saved in the project..however..Intellisense still showed it up as blue and valid in the referencing projects even though when I'd try to recompile the file wasn't found and got the type not found error. Closing and opening Visual Studio still showed the issue (but if I had taken note the class file was missing upon reopening).
Once I realized this, the fix was simple: with the project file set to writeable, readd the missing file to the project. All builds fine now.
I had the same issue. One night my project would compile the next morning ERRORS!.
I eventually found out that visual studio decided to "tweak" some of my references and point them elsewhere. for example:
System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize somehow became "blahblah.System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize"
Quite a rude thing for vs to do if you as me
My case was same as discussed here but nothing solved it until I've removed the System.Core reference from the references list (Everything worked fine without it)
hope it will help someone because this issue is quite frustrating
To solve this issue it can also help to delete and recreate the *.sln.DotSettings file of the associated solution.
Ok, years later using VS 2017 .NET Core 2.2 Razor Pages I feel this answer might help someone.
If it was a snake it would have bit me.
I was throwing stuff around, changing names, renaming Models, and all of a sudden I got this error:
Error CS0246 The type or namespace name 'UploadFileModel' could not be
found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
This was underlined in red in my .chstml Razor Page. (not underlined after fix):
#page
#model UploadFileModel
So, finally, and luckily, I found the code from someone else that I had originally used, and low and behold, the namespace did not include the .cshtml file name!!!
Here is my bad dummy error spank myself with the page name in the namespace:
namespace OESAC.Pages.UploadFile
{
public class UploadFileModel : PageModel
{
What my original code had and all I had to do was delete the page name from the namespace, UploadFile:
namespace OESAC.Pages
{
public class UploadFileModel : PageModel
{
And low and behold, all the errors disappeared!!
Silly me. But you know, MS has made this .NET C# MVC stuff really confusing for us non-computer scientists. I am constantly tripping on my shoelaces trying to figure out model names, page names, and syntax to use them. It shouldn't be this hard. Oh well. I hope error and solution helps someone. The error was right, there is no Namespace named "UploadFileModel" haha.
In my case the problem was that after changing namespace to exactly same as is in another project (intentionally), the name of assembly was changed as well by VS, so there were two assemblies with same name, one overriding the other
Had the same problem after merging some new code into a vs2019 project.
Restarted VS, unloaded and reloaded projects, ensured all projects in solution had same ToolsVersion= and TargetFrameworkVersion. None of this helped.
I had a case of project Substrate, failing to find namespace Skin (in project Skin).
Finally I opened up Substrate.csproj and checked all the ProjectReference Include entries. The others were there, but no reference to Skin, even though Skin did show up in the check box of the little project dependencies dialog. So the project dependencies dialog took the check box for Skin (and saved it somewhere) but did not alter Substrate.csproj. I then added the ProjectReference Include manually, ensuring I had the correct path and GUID for the skin project.
<ProjectReference Include="..\Skin\Skin.csproj">
<Project>{1ad4b5d7-5014-4f5f-983e-2c59ac0e0028}</Project>
<Name>Skin</Name>
</ProjectReference>
I then saved the Substrate.csproj and the problem was solved. So as others have said this is a problem with VS tooling
In my case I had a file built by external dependency (xsd2code) and somehow its designer.cs files were not processed by VS correctly. Creating a new file in Visual Studio and pasting the code in it did the trick for me.
To anyone that is getting this error when they try to publish their website to Azure, none of the promising-looking solutions above helped me. I was in the same boat - my solution built fine on its own. I ended up having to
Remove all nuget packages in my solution.
Close and reopen my solution.
Re-add all the nuget packages.
A little painful but was the only way I could get my website to publish to Azure.

Missing a DLL or assembly reference - Windows.ApplicationModel - Constantly getting errors on this

Not much other information other than I'm trying to copy this:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/contacts-and-calendar/managing-appointments
And it's telling me that it can't find the type or namespace "Windows". Anyone know how to fix this or if there's a work around? It seems to be having the fit at "Windows" not the rest of it.
I've already checked the references, etc. Nothing seems to be working.
There are several ways to solve missing assembly.
If you know what DLL it is, you can import it directly by adding it as reference.
Make sure that the DLL you added as reference CopyToLocal property is true.
If the assembly came from Nuget Package and you just freshly downloaded the project from a repository like git, try right clicking the solution and select Restore Nuget Packages.
If your project does not have the right reference, try download it from the Nuget Package. Make sure that you install the correct version to your project.
In this case, it seems that your project is looking for a Windows.ApplicationModel namespace. Seems like you missed something in your setup. Please check this setup process of microsoft for UWP app development:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get-started/get-set-up

Missing references after fresh install of system

I reinstall my whole system, visual studio, and packages (control suite, crystal reports and so on), and download my solution from team foundation. When I try to rebuild it, I get missing references warning and it does not work :
When I check, all nugets package are (physically) here. The thing which annoys me the more is that even System, System.Data,... are in warning state. Anybody already had this problem (and a fix !) ?
I have a lot of project in my solution, and there's only a part of them which screw up (sorry for my english, it is not my native language).
Try this, nuget package restore.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/consume-packages/package-restore
Have you tried adding them manually under Solution Explorer->right-click your project node then-> click Properties. Click on the References tab and re-add them to the project.
Have a look at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ayds71se.aspx for more suggested solutions. Hope this helps
I had a fix which was to copy all files from my previous disk which were not in TFS and it fixed it all. I am a bit ashamed because I skipped to list them to add util files in TFS. Thanks all for your time.

Fixing NuGet packages and references once and for all

Windows 8.1 Enterprise x64, Visual Studio 2015, MVC 5, EF 6, VS Online using git
I'm a relatively new developer with Visual Studio (about nine months), and ever since I started I've had an incredibly difficult time with references and NuGet packages. All of my references were working correctly on Friday when I shut my computer down for the weekend. I didn't touch the computer at all the entire weekend, now I've booted up today and I have a ton of reference errors:
(There are 6,262 errors total but I obviously can't screenshot the entire thing.)
Like I said, this sort of problem occurs very often, and it's incredibly frustrating. Things I've tried:
Ensure all references throwing the errors actually are referenced
Un/reinstall the packages throwing the errors in NuGet
Completely delete the contents of the packages folder and let NuGet restore them (all reinstalled, views have the same errors as before)
Ensure every single reference is set to Copy Local
Close the solution, delete all bin and obj folders, reboot computer, clean, rebuild
Ensured all necessary references are in the relevant web.config (either inside Views or at the root)
Check for NuGet option to restore missing packages (did not appear, all packages are in my local packages folder)
Other things on SO that I'm sure I've forgotten to list here
I'm at my wits' end with these packages and references. It's a different fix every time, and this time I can't figure it out. Am I missing some obvious fix, something I overlooked? Is there a way to somehow take a backup when this is working and restore it whenever things break? Any ideas whatsoever, whether helping with the current problem or for fixing the underlying problem, would be very much appreciated.
Additional note
The problem is NOT only with views--controllers are also throwing errors. Specifically:
The type or namespace name 'Controller' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
(It literally says Controller, that's not something I changed for privacy or whatnot.)
These are thrown despite the fact that I have using statements for all of the necessary namespaces. The using statements themselves work properly, but the error is thrown in the code. The automatic fix suggested is to manually reference everything: for example, var sb = new StringBuilder(); wants me to change the line to var sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();. Testing that fix does not correct the problem, the same error is thrown but on System instead of StringBuilder.
Additional requested information
I use git with VS Team Services (but packages are ignored with .gitignore).
I and one other person work on this, but the other person hasn't touched it at all (not even pulling from the remote repo) in several weeks.
References in the .csproj file are in the format ..\..\..\packages\ (correct for the location relative to the .csproj file).
Targeting .NET 4.6 (always have been, that's not new)
All references resolve, no exclamation marks in the references list.
New Projects
There is one single thing you need to do in order for packages to work correctly with git:
When you create a repository, make sure you add a .gitignore tailored for Visual Studio development. You can search google for such a file or take it from here.
This will make sure you don't commit anything that will cause problems later.
This should solve a lot of the problems that usually happen when you check in packages to a code repository. You can add/remove packages and upgrade packages and also be able to clone the repository to a new machine and packages will be restored automatically.
Existing Projects
This is good for new projects. If you already have a project with a great big mess, then it is very hard to fix it since Visual Studio keeps package versions in several places - packages.config and app.config (and web.config where relevant).
Option 1 - Fix the current project
You can remove all packages (remove all the references from all projects and delete the package contents).
Make sure that the packages no longer appear in any file (e.g. packages.config or app.config). Now add the .gitignore and then start adding the packages back.
Option 2 - Create a new project
If it doesn't work, start a new project, add the .gitignore, transfer all the code (only your code) and install the packages.
I'm not quite familiar with how Git works in VS, but I recall one time recently when using TFS that unbinding the solution from source control, fixing all packages, cleaning and re-building before binding it again solved a bunch of issues regarding NuGet references.
I apologize if Git works way different within VS.

Getting "type or namespace name could not be found" but everything seems ok?

I'm getting a:
type or namespace name could not be found
error for a C# WPF app in VS2010. This area of code was compiling fine, but suddenly I'm getting this error. I've tried removing the Project Reference and the using statement, shutting VS2010 and restarting, but still I have this issue.
Any ideas why this might be occurring, where it seems like I'm doing the right thing re Reference & using statement?
I also noted in VS2010 that intellisense for that namespace is working ok, so it seems like VS2010 has the project reference and is seeing the namespace on one hand, but during compile doesn't see it?
This can be the result of a .Net framework version incompatibility between two projects.
It can happen in two ways:
a client profile project referencing a full framework project; or
an older framework version targeting a newer framework version
For example it will happen when an application is set to target the .Net 4 Client Profile framework, and the project it references targets the full .Net 4 framework.
So to make that clearer:
Project A targets the Client Profile framework
Project A references Project B
Project B targets the full framework
The solution in this case is to either upgrade the framework target of the application (Project A), or downgrade the target of referenced assembly (Project B). It is okay for a full framework app to reference/consume a client profile framework assembly, but not the other way round (client profile cannot reference full framework targeted assembly).
Note that you can also get this error when you create a new project in VS2012 or VS2013 (which uses .Net 4.5 as the default framework) and:
the referencing project(s) use .Net 4.0 (this is common when you have migrated from VS2010 to VS2012 or VS2013 and you then add a new project)
the referenced projects use a greater version i.e. 4.5.1 or 4.5.3 (you've re-targeted your existing projects to the latest version, but VS still creates new projects targeting v4.5, and you then reference those older projects from the new project)
Reinstalling nuget packages did the trick for me. After I changed .NET Framework versions to be in sync for all projects, some of the nuget packages (especially Entity Framework) were still installed for previous versions. This command in Packages Manager Console reinstalls packages for the whole solution:
Update-Package –reinstall
I've no idea why this worked, but I removed the project reference that VS2015 was telling me it couldn't find, and added it again. Solved the problem. I'd tried both cleaning, building and restarting VS to no avail.
When building the solution I was getting the same error (type or namespace ' ' could not be found). Below it I saw a warning stating that "the reference could not be resolved" and to make sure "the assembly exists on disk".
I was very confused, because my DLL was very clearly in the location that the reference was pointing to. VS didn't seem to highlight any errors, until I tried to build the solution.
I finally realized the problem (or at least what I suspect was the problem). I was building the library file in the same solution. So even though it existed on the disk, it was being rebuilt in that location (somehow in the process of the library getting rebuilt my other project - in the same solution - that referenced the library must have decided that the library didn't exist)
When I right-clicked on the project and built that only, instead of the entire solution, I didn't get the error.
To fix this problem I added the library as a dependency to the project that was using it.
To do this:
I right-clicked on my Solution in the Solution Explorer and selected
"Properties"
Then in "Common Properties" I selected "Project Dependencies".
Then in the Projects drop-down menu I selected the project that
relied on the library, and
Checked the box next to the library found under "Depends On"
This ensures that the library project gets built first.
First I would verify that your project's generated information isn't corrupt. Do a clean and rebuild on your solution.
If that doesn't help, one thing I've seen work in the past for designer issues is opening up a windows forms project, then closing it again. This is a little chicken-entrails-ish, though, so don't hold your breath.
A trickier situation I ran into was:
Project one targets the 4.0 full framework with Microsoft.Bcl.Async package installed.
Project two target the 4.0 full framework but would not compile when reference a Project one class.
Once I installed the Async NuGet package on the second project it compiled fine.
In my case, I find the reference in the VisualStudio have a triangle, and a exclamation mark as this image,
then, I right click remove it, and add the dll reference correctly again, the problem was solved.
I had a similar issue: The compiler was unable to detect a folder inside the same project, so a using directive linking to that folder generated an error. In my case, the problem originated from renaming the folder. Even though I updated the namespace of all the classes inside that folder, the project info somehow failed to update. I tried everything: deleting the .suo file and the bin and obj folders, cleaning the solution, reloading the project - nothing helped. I resolved the problem by deleting the folder and the classes inside, creating a new folder and creating new classes in that new folder (simply moving the classes inside the new folder didn't help).
PS: In my case I was working on a web application, but this problem may occur in different types of projects.
This one worked for me. In your class, where the class name is defined, eg: Public class ABC, remove one character and wait a little. You error list will increase because you have changed the name. Now put back the character that you have typed. This worked for me, hopefully it will work for you too. Good Luck!!!
[Facepalm] My issue was that I had added the dependency in the C++ way of doing things.
Go to the project that won't build, open up the 'References' folder in Solution Explorer, and see if your dependency is listed.
If not, you can 'Add Reference' and choose the dependency on the Projects tab.
Boom Shankar.
Check the Build Action of the .cs file containing the missing type. Make sure it's C# compiler.
Click on the .cs file containing the missing type.
Press F4 to bring up Properties.
Make sure Build Action is set to C# compiler.
Before:
After:
It even happens in Visual Studio 2017.
Restart Visual Studio
Clean project that fails to build.
Rebuild the project.
Had the same errors, my story was following:
after bad merging (via git) one of my .csproj files had duplicated compile entries like:
<Compile Include="Clients\Tree.cs" />
<Compile Include="Clients\Car.cs" />
<Compile Include="Clients\Tree.cs" /> //it's a duplicate
If you have a big solution and more than 300 messages in the errors window it's hard to detect this issue.
So I've opened damaged .csproj file via notepad and removed duplicated entries. Worked in my case.
I had same problem as discussed: VS 2017 underlines a class in referenced project as error but the solution builds ok and even intellisense works.
Here is how I managed to solve this issu:
Unload the referenced project
Open .proj file in VS ( i was looking for duplicates as someone suggested here)
Reload project again (I did not change or even save the proj file as I did not have any duplicates)
We had a weird case of this that I just fixed in a solution. There was a hidden/whitespace character in front of a "using" statement in the main project. That project would build fine and the website worked fine, but the unit test project that referenced it could not be built.
I encountered this problem when upgrading existing projects from VS2008 to VS2012. I found that two projects (the only two that I created) were targeting different .Net Frameworks (3.5 and 4.0). I resolved this on the Application tab of the projects by making sure that both projects had ".NET Framework 4" in the Target Framework box.
In my case I had a Class that was listed in the proper source folder, but was not registering in Solution Explorer. I had to do right click the project > Add Existing item and manually select that Class it said it was missing. Then everything worked fine!
I know its old, but I've found the same issue. My project did build, I then updated Visual Studio to the latest & the project wouldnt build as it couldnt find a type definition from a separate assembly. The other assembly built OK, the main project referenced it correctly & nothing had changed since it built OK.
I cleaned the whole solution & rebuilt it, it failed. I built the assembly on its own, it built OK. The project didnt build. I cleaned & built multiple times, and it failed. I then called a colleague to look at it, when I built with him watching, it all built OK.
I think Visual Studio tooling is the problem, especially as I just updated it.
In my case, I unload the project, then:
Opened myProject.csproj and update the ToolsVersion="4.0" to ToolsVersion="12.0"(I'm using vs 2017)(using Paulus's answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/64552201/1594487).
Deleted following lines from the myProject.csproj:
<Import Project="..\packages\EntityFramework.6.4.0\build\EntityFramework.props" Condition="Exists('..\packages\EntityFramework.6.4.0\build\EntityFramework.props')" />
<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\$(MSBuildToolsVersion)\Microsoft.Common.props" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\$(MSBuildToolsVersion)\Microsoft.Common.props')" />
And the problem solved.
You might also try eliminating the code you think you're having problems with and seeing if it compiles with no references to that code. If not, fix things until it compiles again, and then work your suspected problem code back in. Sometimes I get strange errors about classes or methods that I know are correct when the compiler doesn't like something else. Once I fix the thing that it's really getting hung up on, these 'phantom' errors disappear.
I know this is kicking a dead horse but I had this error and the frameworks where fine. My problem was basically stating that an interface could not be found, yet it build and accessed just fine. So I got to thinking: "Why just this interface when others are working fine?"
It ended up that I was actually accessing a service using WCF with an endpoint's interface that was using Entity Version 6 and the rest of the projects were using version 5. Instead of using NuGet I simply copied the nuget packages to a local repository for reuse and listed them differently.
e.g. EntityFramework6.dll versus EntityFramework.dll.
I then added the references to the client project and poof, my error went away. I realize this is an edge case as most people will not mix versions of Entity Framework.
Adding my solution to the mix because it was a bit different and took me a while to figure out.
In my case I added a new class to one project but because my version control bindings weren't set I needed to make the file writable outside of Visual Studio (via the VC). I had cancelled out of the save in Visual Studio but after I made the file writable outside VS I then hit Save All again in VS. This inadvertently caused the new class file to not be saved in the project..however..Intellisense still showed it up as blue and valid in the referencing projects even though when I'd try to recompile the file wasn't found and got the type not found error. Closing and opening Visual Studio still showed the issue (but if I had taken note the class file was missing upon reopening).
Once I realized this, the fix was simple: with the project file set to writeable, readd the missing file to the project. All builds fine now.
I had the same issue. One night my project would compile the next morning ERRORS!.
I eventually found out that visual studio decided to "tweak" some of my references and point them elsewhere. for example:
System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize somehow became "blahblah.System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize"
Quite a rude thing for vs to do if you as me
My case was same as discussed here but nothing solved it until I've removed the System.Core reference from the references list (Everything worked fine without it)
hope it will help someone because this issue is quite frustrating
To solve this issue it can also help to delete and recreate the *.sln.DotSettings file of the associated solution.
Ok, years later using VS 2017 .NET Core 2.2 Razor Pages I feel this answer might help someone.
If it was a snake it would have bit me.
I was throwing stuff around, changing names, renaming Models, and all of a sudden I got this error:
Error CS0246 The type or namespace name 'UploadFileModel' could not be
found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)
This was underlined in red in my .chstml Razor Page. (not underlined after fix):
#page
#model UploadFileModel
So, finally, and luckily, I found the code from someone else that I had originally used, and low and behold, the namespace did not include the .cshtml file name!!!
Here is my bad dummy error spank myself with the page name in the namespace:
namespace OESAC.Pages.UploadFile
{
public class UploadFileModel : PageModel
{
What my original code had and all I had to do was delete the page name from the namespace, UploadFile:
namespace OESAC.Pages
{
public class UploadFileModel : PageModel
{
And low and behold, all the errors disappeared!!
Silly me. But you know, MS has made this .NET C# MVC stuff really confusing for us non-computer scientists. I am constantly tripping on my shoelaces trying to figure out model names, page names, and syntax to use them. It shouldn't be this hard. Oh well. I hope error and solution helps someone. The error was right, there is no Namespace named "UploadFileModel" haha.
In my case the problem was that after changing namespace to exactly same as is in another project (intentionally), the name of assembly was changed as well by VS, so there were two assemblies with same name, one overriding the other
Had the same problem after merging some new code into a vs2019 project.
Restarted VS, unloaded and reloaded projects, ensured all projects in solution had same ToolsVersion= and TargetFrameworkVersion. None of this helped.
I had a case of project Substrate, failing to find namespace Skin (in project Skin).
Finally I opened up Substrate.csproj and checked all the ProjectReference Include entries. The others were there, but no reference to Skin, even though Skin did show up in the check box of the little project dependencies dialog. So the project dependencies dialog took the check box for Skin (and saved it somewhere) but did not alter Substrate.csproj. I then added the ProjectReference Include manually, ensuring I had the correct path and GUID for the skin project.
<ProjectReference Include="..\Skin\Skin.csproj">
<Project>{1ad4b5d7-5014-4f5f-983e-2c59ac0e0028}</Project>
<Name>Skin</Name>
</ProjectReference>
I then saved the Substrate.csproj and the problem was solved. So as others have said this is a problem with VS tooling
In my case I had a file built by external dependency (xsd2code) and somehow its designer.cs files were not processed by VS correctly. Creating a new file in Visual Studio and pasting the code in it did the trick for me.
To anyone that is getting this error when they try to publish their website to Azure, none of the promising-looking solutions above helped me. I was in the same boat - my solution built fine on its own. I ended up having to
Remove all nuget packages in my solution.
Close and reopen my solution.
Re-add all the nuget packages.
A little painful but was the only way I could get my website to publish to Azure.

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