Today we encountered ASP.Net’s “Could not load type” error. This error is described in http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q306155
but unfortunately the given solution (rebuilt your solution/project) does not work… Duh… We’re professionals here, don’t you think we’ve tried that Microsoft? Luckely, there’s still google and after a quick search we found the solution.
Here’s the situation: our company uses an acceptation server that runs a large collection of sites that we developed or are currently developing for our clients. Each site has its own folder but all these folders are placed under a single virtual folder (application). For ASP.Net this is a single web application and thus it expects all the assemblies to reside in the bin folder immediately below the virtual folder’s folder.
So, in the first situation we had placed our assembly like this:
/webroot/acceptation/client_A/bin/ourAssembly.dll
But because ASP.Net doesn’t look in this bin folder because it’s too deep in the tree. Instead, we had to move our bin folder up one level so it looks like this:
/webroot/acceptation/bin/ourAssembly.dll
When we did that everything worked fine.