The name 'ViewBag' does not exist in the current context

Question

I am trying to use ViewBag in my application, I have all of the recent dlls, the latest version of MVC 3, but yet I am still getting the Error:

\"The

Answer 1

If you had tried all available answers and still cannot find the answer this might solve issue. If you have different solutions configurations like Debug, Release etc then set project output path to 'bin' and compile project. Revert change after compiling.

VS looks for dlls in bin folder

Answer 2

For MVC5, in case you are building an application from scratch. You need to add a web.config file to the Views folder and paste the following code in it.

<?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=5.0.0.0, 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.Routing" />
      </namespaces>
    </pages>
  </system.web.webPages.razor>
</configuration>

Note that for MVC 3 you will have to change version to 3.0.0.0 at

<host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />

You may have to close and open the *.cshtml page again to see the changes.

Answer 3

Try to Clean and rebuild. It worked in my case.

Answer 4

If you use Visual Studio 2013 and you like use MVC 3, you get this error because Visual Studio 2013 does not support MVC 3 natively (even of you change ./Views/web.config), only MVC 4: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh266747.aspx

Answer 5

I had the same problem in a solution that had been upgraded to MVC 5 in Visual Studio 2015.

In the web.config file within the Views folder (not the root web.config), I updated the version number referred to in <configSections> from 2.0.0.0 to 3.0.0.0.

<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>

Answer 6

After trying different things, it turns out it was VS cache. You can resolve it by deleting the cache files located in:

C:\Users\your.name.here\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\ComponentModelCache

I closed my project, deleted the files on that path and reopened my project, cleaned the solution and built it again and the problem was solved

The files will be recreated when you next launch Visual Studio