ASP.NET Websites and Sub-Folders in Project Output Paths

This will be a quick post but I wanted to get it out there while I remembered.

Yesterday and this morning at work I was faced with an unusual problem. One of our ASP.NET MVC websites, which worked perfectly fine until now, decided it did not want to compile. Specifically it was the Razor engine which wasn’t happy; the actual project would compile fine in Visual Studio but as soon as I ran it a runtime compiler error would happen immediately because a collection of Razor helpers could not find our own assembly as a reference. What’s going on?

So I searched and searched and found all sorts of questions on StackOverflow explaining how to add an assembly reference to the Web.config file and add it to the specific Razor Web.config settings but that wasn’t helping me at all; it simply refused to run.

Out of sheer frustration I started comparing the project folder to a previous version to see what could have possibly changed to break it and the only difference I found was that another developer had checked in a change which would compile the project output from “bin\” to “bin\{Configuration}”. Surely that can’t be the cause, can it?

Actually it was, and this blog post by Adam Craven explained why:

Intellisense in Razor for Custom Types and Helpers

Now most Visual Studio project templates will setup the output path of the compiled files to be “bin\{Configuration}”, which sounds sensible to me. Apparently ASP.NET projects don’t do this because the ASP.NET runtime will not find your own assemblies for some reason – as I said, the blog post above explains it better than I could.

So all in all a frustrating morning was resolved simply by changing the project output path. It’s funny how the simplest thing can completely break your code.