Razor Views not seeing System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper

Question

I am in the process of upgrading to MVC4. I have followed the instructions at http://www.asp.net/whitepapers/mvc4-release-notes#_Toc303253806 but in my Razor views and layou

Answer 1

I've encountered this specific issue as well; no (or incorrect) intellisense showing when trying to use razor tags. My specific issue was VS2015 complaining that Html.BeginForm was not existing in the current context.

I've got areas set up in my MVC project, and managed to narrow down the cause of my error to the web.config file for a specific area, rather than the global web.config.

It turns out that the cause of this issue for me was that I'd added a SQL connectionString into the web.config for the area that was not working, this (I am assuming) caused a parsing error, however the project compiled up correctly.

Moving the connectionString to the global web.config has rectified the issue. Hopefully this may be of some use to others.

Answer 2

I came across several answers in SO and at the end I realized that my error was that I had misspelled "Html.TextBoxFor." In my case what I wrote was "Html.TextboxFor." I did not uppercase the B in TextBoxFor. Fixed that and voilà. Problem solved. I hope this helps someone.

Answer 3

I had run a project clean, and installed or reinstalled everything and was still getting lots of Intellisense errors, even though my site was compiling and running fine. Intellisense finally worked for me when I changed the version numbers in my web.config file in the Views folder. In my case I'm coding a module in Orchard, which runs in an MVC area, but I think this will help anyone using the latest release of MVC. Here is my web.config from the Views folder

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <configuration>
      <configSections>
        <sectionGroup name="system.web.webPages.razor" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorWebSectionGroup, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35">
          <section name="host" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.HostSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" />
          <section name="pages" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorPagesSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" />
        </sectionGroup>
      </configSections>

      <system.web.webPages.razor>
        <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
        <pages pageBaseType="Orchard.Mvc.ViewEngines.Razor.WebViewPage">
          <namespaces>
            <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" />
            <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" />
            <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" />
            <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" />
            <add namespace="System.Linq" />
            <add namespace="System.Collections.Generic" />
          </namespaces>
        </pages>
      </system.web.webPages.razor>

      <system.web>

        <!--
            Enabling request validation in view pages would cause validation to occur
            after the input has already been processed by the controller. By default
            MVC performs request validation before a controller processes the input.
            To change this behavior apply the ValidateInputAttribute to a
            controller or action.
        -->
        <pages
            validateRequest="false"
            pageParserFilterType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewTypeParserFilter, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL"
            pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL"
            userControlBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL">
          <controls>
            <add assembly="System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35, processorArchitecture=MSIL" namespace="System.Web.Mvc" tagPrefix="mvc" />
          </controls>
        </pages>
      </system.web>

      <system.webServer>
        <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />

        <handlers>
          <remove name="BlockViewHandler"/>
          <add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*" verb="*" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" />
        </handlers>
      </system.webServer>
    </configuration>

Answer 4

Just to expand on Matt DeKrey's answer, just deleting the csproj.user file (without needing to recreate solutions) was able to fix the problem for me.

The only side effect I had was I needed to reset the Start Action back to using a specific page.

Answer 5

For me the solution was to change the following:

  <pages
        validateRequest="false"
        pageParserFilterType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewTypeParserFilter, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"
        pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"
        userControlBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35">
      <controls>
        <add assembly="System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" namespace="System.Web.Mvc" tagPrefix="mvc" />
      </controls>
    </pages>

Answer 6

I was dealing with this issue after upgrading from Visual Studio 2013 to Visual Studio 2015 After trying most of the advice found in this and other similar SO posts, I finally found the problem. The first part of the fix was to update all of my NuGet stuff to the latest version (you might need to do this in VS13 if you are experiencing the Nuget bug) after, I had to, as you may need to, fix the versions listed in the Views Web.config. This includes:

1. Fix MVC versions and its child libraries to the new version (expand the References then right click onSytem.Web.MVC then Properties to get your version)
2. Fix the Razor version.

Mine looked like this:

<configuration>
  <configSections>
    <sectionGroup name="system.web.webPages.razor" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorWebSectionGroup, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35">
      <section name="host" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.HostSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" />
      <section name="pages" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorPagesSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" requirePermission="false" />
    </sectionGroup>
  </configSections>

  <system.web.webPages.razor>
    <host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
    <pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage">
      <namespaces>
        <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" />
        <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" />
        <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" />
        <add namespace="System.Web.Optimization"/>
        <add namespace="System.Web.Routing" />
      </namespaces>
    </pages>
  </system.web.webPages.razor>

  <appSettings>
    <add key="webpages:Enabled" value="false" />
  </appSettings>

  <system.web>
    <httpHandlers>
      <add path="*" verb="*" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler"/>
    </httpHandlers>
    <pages
      validateRequest="false"
      pageParserFilterType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewTypeParserFilter, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"
      pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"
      userControlBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35">
      <controls>
        <add assembly="System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" namespace="System.Web.Mvc" tagPrefix="mvc" />
      </controls>
    </pages>
  </system.web>

  <system.webServer>
    <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />

    <handlers>
      <remove name="BlockViewHandler"/>
      <add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*" verb="*" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" />
    </handlers>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>