extended controls in website converted to webapp won't compile

Question

I have a VS 2005 website that I need to convert to a web application. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I'm actually breaking out part of the website into its own. The part that's going to be on its own is a small subset of the rest of the website. I've created a new web project, copied over all of the pages, and removed all of the code that's not needed for my small app. I have some user controls and custom controls which inherit from ASP.NET WebControls
(ex: public class AutoCheckboxList: System.Web.UI.WebControls.CheckBoxList)

that will not compile after the conversion.
I followed the directions here: Converting a Web Site Project to a Web Application Project but it says nothing about the problem I'm having.

I removed my Register's from my aspx pages and put them in the web.config (ex:
add tagPrefix="uc1" tagName="TopOfPage" src="~/WebUserControls/TopOfPage.ascx" />

hoping that would help, but no luck. I get errors of:
Element 'TopOfPage' is not a known element. This can occur if there is a compilation error in the Web site.

This has been driving me crazy! Has anyone run into this before? If so, how did you fix it? My last resort is to either leave it as a website, or to have to manually initialize all of these. I want to avoid both if at all possible. Eventually we want to convert the original website to a web app as well. I've talked to other people on my team and this problem is the only thing preventing the conversion of the original website.

TIA, Theresa

Answer 1

I agree! Web Applications are so much nicer than web sites!

It looks like Visual Studio has got itself mixed up somewhere along the lines. Try following these steps:

• Clean the Solution
• Close Visual Studio
• Delete the .suo file (it's a hidden file that lives in the same folder as your solution file)
• Delete your temporary ASP.NET files (everything in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files)
• Reopen your solution in Visual Studio
• Manually compile the projects one at a time, in order of dependency on one another