Ok, I am in the process of breaking apart of intranet application (VS 2010 Web Site, ASP.NET Web Forms with VB code behind). During this process i'm trying to convert some of our our app_code files in to WCF rest service in a new project. However, when I copy or "add existing" vb files into the new "services" project. I get tons of errors including...
error BC30002: Type 'XXX' is not defined
warning BC40056: Namespace
or type specified in the Imports 'System.ServiceModel' doesn't
contain any public member or cannot be found. Make sure the
namespace or the type is defined and contains at least one public
member. Make sure the imported element name doesn't use any aliases.
From what i've read it may (or may not) have something to do with Assemblies and references that I just have very little knowledge on. I have added the namespaces from the current web.config to new project's web.config, and the files are identical. So there is something in the background that needs to be added to the new project I just don't know what its.
PLEASE HELP!!
THANKS
JOSH
UPDATE 1
So one of the errors i'm getting = "error BC30002: Type 'MailMessage' is not defined." Which is a namespace that is added to the web.config, which apparently isn't being picked up??? IDEAS?
I've come across a similar issue - not sure what the reasoning behind it is, but I got around it by creating a new .vb class with the same name as the one you want to copy, then copy and paste all the text from the old one to the new one. Save it, then it seems to like it - it didn't like me copying and pasting the actual file, nor did it like me adding existing files.
Hope this helps :/
This issue seems to be tied to the the differences between Web Application Projects versus Web Site Projects. Eventually I had to add different namespaces on the new project level.
Here is more info about WAP vs WSP....
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd547590(v=vs.110).aspx
Related
My question is similar to here: ASP.NET System.Anything is not defined
I am in the process of converting a website project to an MVC 4 project. To do this, I created a new MVC project and imported all of my content from the previous website. Both projects are in VB, and I'm using Visual Studio 2010 SP1, with both the MVC 4 update and TFS 2012 update applied.
I now have errors popping up when I build the MVC project. Things like "Type 'System.Web.UI.Webcontrol' is not defined." When I hover over the error, two of the prompts I get to fix it are
1) Change 'System.Web.UI.WebControl' to 'Global.System.Web.UI.WebControl'
2) Change 'System.Web.UI.WebControl' to 'WebControl'
Both of these seem to fix it, but does anyone know why I can't use "System.Web.UI.WebControl" to refer to this class? I'd rather not change all of my code... there are 100s of thousands lines in there.
Update: Outside of the System and System.Web.UI namespaces, I can also drop the 'System.'. So 'System.Drawing.Color' would become 'Drawing.Color'.
There exists another namespace containing System in your solution somewhere (e.g. Abc.System.def) - probably in a referenced library. After the conversion, the project file probably imported the prefix to System in said namespace (e.g. Abc), so when you type in System, it resolves to Abc.System.
I posted this question before I had whittled down as much of the compile errors as possible.
It appears that after I had removed all the System. references from the previous App_Code classes, the real errors started appearing. There were all sorts of messages about aspx controls not existing.
Ultimately, it seemed that I needed to right-click on the .aspx pages from my website project and choose 'Convert to Web Application.' This generated a .aspx.designer.vb file with the asp.net control declarations in yet another partial class.
After doing that for all pages, I am now able to use System. throughout the app.
To others who've asked, this System. error was only affecting the non-page code. .aspx, .aspx.vb, .ascx, .ascx.vb, .ashx, etc., files were not affected.
This does make some sense, anyhow, as I had previously pulled in all the App_Code libraries prior to pulling in the pages, and the site compiled. After importing the pages and their code behinds, the order of the errors was just odd. But I stuck with it and found the underlying cause.
Thanks for the willingness to help. If you have any other questions, I'd be glad to respond.
In a dynamically compiled ASP.NET Website project, can the assembly for the App_Code folder be explicitly named?
For example, under regular circumstances when I run an ASP.NET website the assembly name generated into the Temporary ASP.NET Files\ folder is partially randomized like App_Code.neizakfo.dll where neizakfo is the portion that can differ. Can I explicitly provide a name for the assembly like App_Code_Web1.dll?
Clarification
By business requirements, the website cannot be precompiled/deployed. Therefore I'm seeking a solution in context of the Temporary ASP.NET Files folder and dynamically compiled assemblies as noted above.
Background:
I came across this question while looking for a way to perform dynamic type instantiation on a class in the App_Code folder of a website using an assembly-qualified name stored in configuration, but instantiated from the web page, thus crossing an assembly boundary. Because the web page and app_code code are compiled into two different assemblies by default, the Type.GetType(..) method's default behaviour of searching for the Type name either in the current executing assembly (the web page) or in mscorlib doesn't suffice for picking any Type from the App_Code assembly. Being randomized, the app_code assembly name is not known for me to include in the assembly-qualified string.
I can put the data Type in a class library (because that does have an predefined/exact name) to get rid of this problem, however I'd like to know how to do this inside the website itself without creating a class library project for the purpose.
You can sort of do this in a WebSite project.
There's an MSDN article on using the -fixednames flag when compiling the project.
This effectively creates an assembly for each page - default.aspx.dll. However, this is only marginally more useful to you as you still need to know the name of the control or page you are looking for when you are loading - so you have to ensure your types and naming is consistent. It should, however, respect the name of the classes in app_code so this may work for you.
One other thing you could do is move all of the code in app_code out into it's own assembly, and then add that as a project reference. That would also simplify this problem.
Lastly, you could enumerate all of the dll's in the bin directory, and search each one for the type you are looking for. As this is fairly expensive, do it once, and cache the result somewhere so you don't keep doing it everytime you look that type up. This is probably the worst solution.
This is trivial to do in a WebApplication project, but I assume you are stuck with the WebSite one?
EDIT: As an update for the comments; if I use the Publish Web Tool, then all of the code in app_code goes in the bin directory in a dll called App_Code.dll - this behaviour does not change even if I use fixed naming (all fixed naming effects the naming of the dll's for each page, usercontrol). If I use ILSpy on this file, I can see my classes in there. So I know the name of the assembly, and it's location - I should be able to get at the types in it with minimal effort. I wonder why I'm seeing different behavior to you!
I created a simple class called "Person" with an Id and Name, put it in App_Code, compiled the site, and then ran the following code:
Type myType = Assembly.LoadFrom(Server.MapPath("~/bin/App_Code.dll")).GetType("Person", true);
Response.Write(myType.ToString());
It wrote out "Person", as expected.
Further Edit
The penny drops! If I then do:
object myObject= Activator.CreateInstance("App_Code.dll", "Person");
And try to cast myObject to person, I get the following message:
The type 'Person' exists in both 'App_Code.dll' and 'App_Code.jydjsaaa.dll'
So it's time to be devious.
in Global.asax, on Application_OnStart, do the following:
Application["App_Code_Assembly"] = Assembly.GetAssembly(typeof(Person));
In my test default page, I then did:
Assembly app_Code = Application["App_Code_Assembly"] as Assembly;
Response.Write(app_Code.FullName);
Which gave me the randomly named app_code it is actually running with in Temporary ASP.Net Files.
This is why I hate Web Site Projects ;-)
I have a couple of web applications whose source code is missing. The project is compiled to a dll and is hosted on a IIS.
I have couple of questions to make.
What is the best way to recreate the
project from the dll file??
We are planning to change the
database server, and the database
connection strings are specified in
the Global.asax ( I mean the public
class Global : HttpApplication ). Is
there a way I can subclass this
Global and override the connection
strings? If yes, how can I make the
IIS refer to the new dll
Thank you all for any suggestions!!
For first part, use decompiler tools such as Reflector/ILSpy/dotPeek to convert IL code from DLL to higher level language such as C#. However, tools cannot get back comments, local variable names and project structure. You need to manually organize the code into files and project structures. From aspx files, you have to figure out the code-behind classes and then link up the source of the class into a correct named code-behind file - for example, if default.aspx says that it inherits from MyApp.Default then create file default.aspx.xs and put the source code for the class into that.
For second part, you can create a new class derived from Global and modify Global.asax to use that class - you need to put the assembly containing new class in bin folder and overwrite inherits clause in asax file to point to the type name of new class. You anyway need to inspect the code of your current Global class (using tools sighted above) to see if you can override connection strings by sub-classing.
Probably the best tool available to reverse engineer a dll into code is .NET Reflector. Unfortunately, the latest version is no longer free, but it is worth the money.
I am not sure exactly if this still applies if you can already reverse engineer your source code. However, I would recommend moving your connection strings outside of your project into web.config as a best practice. This way you can make the change in the future without changing any code.
I have one of those annoying problems where something that used to work stopped working.
Check out this code:
Assembly _abc_assembly = Assembly.LoadFile(“c:\junk\abcabstract\bin\abc.dll”);
ABC.ContentAttribute attribute;
attribute = (ABC.ContentAttribute)_abc_assembly.CreateInstance("ABC.TextAttribute");
ContentAttribute is defined in the dll.
Obviously, this should work. You should be able to cast an object to itself.
But it produces this error:
alt text http://www.yart.com.au/stackoverflow/compile1.png
This bug is discussed here http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/plugin.html which is how I got even this far. From this post I gather that the class ContentAttribute is somehow ending up in ABC.DLL and the website project's DLL.
The website project I have looks like this:
alt text http://www.yart.com.au/stackoverflow/compile2.png
Now ContentAttribute is not in this project, it is in the dll ABC.DLL. You can see that as I have expanded every branch and the file ContentAttribute.cs is not there.
Yet somehow it is ending up in the dll for the website creating a duplicating reference. ContentAttribute is somehow ending up in ABC.DLL and the website project's DLL.
Can anyone tell me:
a) Why is ContentAttribute in two dlls? I didn’t think including a dll in a project forced that code into the projects DLL.
b) How to stop it from happening?
By the way, I definitely don't want to change the website project into a website application if I can avoid it.
Notes:
Deleting the temporary ASP.NET files does not work. As soon as I compile my website project they get recreated.
alt text http://www.yart.com.au/stackoverflow/compile3.png
It's a namespace collision. It doesnt know which ContentAttribute to use since it is finding 2 in different namespaces/assemblies.
You may have an old copy of the DLL named differently. Delete your temporary ASP.Net directories and recompile.
To avoid in the future:
Use fully qualified names for your objects if you need to get it to work.
ABC.ContentAttribute ca = new ABC.ContentAttribute();
or if casting do the same
ABC.ContentAttribute ca =(ABC.ContentAttribute)ca2;
ABC.DLL is referenced by your website and it becomes part of it (it is in Bin folder). ASP.NET compiles your website and ABC.DLL is placed in temp location (C:\Windows...\Temporary ASP.NET Filse...). It gets loaded by ASP.NET automatically. You are trying to load ABC.DLL manually from different location (D:\junk\abcabstract\bin\abc.dl). Two assemblies do not match hence you get the error.
To stop this from happening you have to rethink your plugin architecture I guess. Can you give more information?
Update:
Why don't you fix it like this:
// Assembly _abc_assembly = Assembly.LoadFile(“c:\junk\abcabstract\bin\abc.dll”);
// ContentAttribute attribute;
// attribute = (ContentAttribute)_abc_assembly.CreateInstance("ABC.TextAttribute");
ContentAttribute attribute = new ContentAttribute();
I have a class declared in the App_Code folder. The class contains a public shared method that returns a type Portfolio.
When I try to call this method to initialize an object of type Portfolio in one of the ASCX controls, i get a "Value of type Jaguar.Portfolio cannot be converted to Jaguar.Portfolio" message.
This is a "Website" project. I have tried using CType and DirectCast and I still get the same compilation error when I try to build the site.
I am using the line of code listed below in the code behind file of the ascx control
Dim pObjSvc As Jaguar.Portfolio = ClassName.GetPortfolio
Do you have a webpage or a user control also called Portfolio? You may have a name space collision where it's confused between which Portfolio object to use. If this is the case, you'll need to change the name of the Class/Module or the control's or page's code behind class and you should be all set.
There seems to be someone else with the same problem out there:
ASP Net - value of type "MyNamespace.MyClassName" cannot be converted to "MyNamespace.MyClassName"
I have a ASP.Net application that uses
assemblies from several other
solutions. When testing the
applications on my machine I build all
the referenced assemblies using nmake.
The latest assemblies get placed in a
common directory that is referenced by
my ASP.NET app.
Occasionally I receive the following
error: value of type
"MyNamespace.MyClassName" cannot be
converted to "MyNamespace.MyClassName"
(there are a lot of these for
different classes) when doing a debug
build. I have tried the following with
no luck:
Build the ASP.Net application Rebuild
the ASP.Net application Close VS and
build the ASP.Net application Close
VS.Net as rebuild the asp.Net
application IISreset and build/rebuild
the application
It seems the only thing that works is
if I run nmake to build all my referenced assemblies, I can then
build the ASP.Net application.
Any ideas as to what causes this? Is
there an easier way to fix it?
Sadly, the author of the question did non find a definitive answer. But perhaps it contains a hint which could be helpful to find the solution.
UPDATE: I'm not sure if that is even possible in a ASP.NET website, but maybe you accidentally added a reference to a (temporary) assemmbly of the project itself? That would explain the error. Try also to remove the contents of bin and obj folder.
Just a debugging tip:
Try to rename the Portfolio class and recompile. Maybe there is an old assembly somewhere or some other code in .vb your files which contains a class with the same name?
I have seen situations similar to this when an aspx page was created with the same name as a business object class. Do you have some some aspx page with a code-behind class of Portfolio as well?