ASP.NET development server unwilling to upgrade to .NET 3.5

Question

I had an ASP.NET 2.0 web project. Worked fine. I decided to upgrade the site to 3.5. The upgrade worked fine. I have added a IHttpHandler that required to include the following line in the web.config:

<add verb="GET,POST" path="MyOperation.asmx" type="MyClass"/>

This line in the web.config generates the following error: "Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'MyClass'." This sounds like a typical spelling error in the class name. But it looks not, I checked it 1000 times. However, what is really strange that on the bottom of the "yellow-screen-of-death" page it says:

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.3082; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.3082

This is really strange. The project is set to 3.5. The only piece of code that use 3.5 features are the IHttpHandler implementation. All the rest of the web project are 2.0 compatible and works without problem if I exclude the line from the web.config. Why is this?

[I did not try with IIS. I use ASP.NET development server.]

[EDIT] I have to apologize, it was stupid spelling issue as I expected in the first round. My IHttpHandler implementation was in a nested class and the proper class name is "OuterClass+NestedClass" vs OuterClass.NestedClass that I used in my config file. However, I thank to all who contributed because I learned new things on CLR versioning!

Answer 1

I think you need to use the fully qualified type name.

Like:

<add verb="GET,POST" path="MyOperation.asmx" type="Your.Namespace.MyClass, assembly.name"/>

and the error containing the version information of 2 is normall since the CLR hasn't changed for 3 and 3.5. the only changes were additional sepperate assemblies and syntactic suggar (like automated properties are a feature of the compiler not the runtime) ".net 4" will come with a new CLR.

Answer 2

The version is not an issue ( I think). .net 2 to 3.5 sp1 use the same run time. The newer ones are just new libraries and compilers. So from the asp.net point of view not much has changed.

Answer 3

Go to the project properties. Choose the Application tab. Change the Target Framework to .Net Framework 3.5 if you haven't done that already.

Answer 4

ASP.NET 3.5 is really 2.0 with extra extensions. So, as long as the server has 3.5 installed, then the message that shows that you're pointing to the 2.0 framework confirms that you have it setup correctly.

The issue is likely what olle suggested, that you need the full class name, assembly name.

Also confirm that you have the dll in your /bin folder and that it's marked as an application if you're not working from the root of your site.