Why can I not get my Visual Studio app to recognize a folder labeled "Data"?

Question

When I "Add/Folder/Data" I expect to see when I add "@Using WebCraft.Data". It does not and provides an error, I have tried "Database" with the same result. It started with the last update to visual studio 2022 64 bit version 17.10.3.

Answer 1

That isn't how it works. A folder (in Solution Explorer) is just that, a folder. It has no "runtime" aspect and therefore doesn't change your code in any way. You could have all your source files in a single directory or scattered across 100s and the code compiles the same. Folders are there strictly to make it easier to group related files together. So, adding a new folder changes nothing about what is or is not available to your code.

You mentioned @using which leads me to believe you're building an Razor page. This is equivalent to the C# using statement which is used to import a namespace to the current source file so any related types in that namespace are available. A folder is not a namespace, as mentioned earlier. A namespace by itself doesn't have a runtime counterpart. All it does is contribute to the global name of whatever types are defined in it. If a namespace has no types then the namespace doesn't exist.

I suspect you're used to creating a folder and then adding a class to that folder. In that case the default IDE behavior is to create the class in a namespace that follows the <defaultprojectname>\<folder> convention. Hence you can then have a @using statement that references the namespace, not the folder. This is a convention and not always followed.

So, to fix your issue, you need to add at least 1 type to the folder you created. Then that type will, by default, have the namespace name WebCraft.Data and then your @using statement will find the namespace, not folder.

Answer 2

I rolled back to the previous version 17.96 and the application started working with out errors. It recognized the Data folder and built exactly as designed. On my desktop I uninstalled and reinstalled the latest version and got the same errors with not recognizing the Data folder nor would it recognize the Shared folder I added.