Lots of type errors in Visual Studio Error List -- until I build and then they are gone

Question

I recently added a new project to my Visual Studio 2008 solution. Now, as I make edits in the new project, I receive a ton (~50) of type checking errors - indicating that an assembly reference may be missing. However, when I actually build the solution, the errors go away. As best I can tell, my dependencies are set and the build order is correct. What could be wrong?

It doesn't prevent me from building and deploying, but it's a major nuisance. It makes it hard to tell when I actually have introduced new errors (until I do compile). Thus, it erodes the usefulness of having the error window do static analysis.

Example, one of the 50 errors is this: "The type of namespace name 'PersonManager' does not exist in the namespace 'Gideon' (are you missing an assembly reference?" In reference to this line of code: Gideon.PersonManager pm = new Gideon.PersonManager()

PersonManager is underlined in both places, and when I right click the type and selected 'find all references' I get an alert box that says "Cannot navigate to PersonManager"

However, the references are definitely there, because when I build, it works.

One other detail is that there is a mixture of C# and VB.net code, though I don't think that should make a difference.

Answer 1

Well, yes, the IntelliSense parser is not an exact replica of the C# compiler. It has a very different job to do, it needs to do something meaningful while the code is utterly broken since you are editing it. Tough assignment, they did a tremendous job with it. But as a side-effect, it can fail to parse things that are actually legal. It's quite rare but not unheard of, seen it myself a few times.

This won't go anywhere concrete until you at least give us some idea of what kind of errors you are seeing, along with a snippet of the code that generates them. You didn't do so, I can only recommend that you select another window so you don't have to look at them.