My wording of this question has not turned up any search results, so forgive me if this has been covered.

The auto-generated aspx.designer.cs generates fields for our user controls as type usercontrol instead of the correct concrete type.

ie

 protected ...UserControl ctrlMyControl;

instead of

protected ...MyControl ctrlMyControl;

I think it is because we declare our tag prefixes in the web.config like so:

 instead of in every page. Is this by design? ie is the not supported?

Thanks 

Drag and drop the control into the designer not the source and will work, will add the tags as well.

I don't know why does not work when you are in source, something that an MVP can answer for us!

It doesn't just happen when the control is added.
Anytime I modify the source, the designer class gets regenerated and it get's messed up.

I set up a quick test to ensure it was nothing else.
New Web Application Project (not web site)
drop a Usercontrol in default.aspx, (goes in fine as it drops in a register tag instruction)
delete the instruction
modify the web.config to add that tag prefix

Modify default.aspx and the problem occurs.

My question now is where is the generator that gens the desginer code?
How do i go about raising issues with it?

Easier maintenance. We have a number of UserControl libraries that get merged into different applications.
If we reshuffle namespaces or location of the controls changing the declaration in a centralised place is much more enjoyable. :)

That said... we don't so much as we recently found out you could and are starting to. :)

That said... we don't so much as we recently found out you could and are starting to. :)

Makes sense

I'm having the same issue. 

 Unfortunately, if you add the register tag to the page along with the entry in the web.config then updates to the page do not show up in the page.Designer.vb file at all.  If I remove the entry from web.config and keep the register of the control in the page then the generated control variable is typed as desired.  Having the types remain UserControl is unworkable.  I'm thinking I might create a readonly property in the class which casts the control to the proper type, but this would be a bit of a bummer to always have to do.  I can't think of a better way around this.

<Bump>

I'd like to raise this as a bug but not sure whether it is to do with the Web Project Extension or VS itself?
I imagine it is in the Code Generator but not sure which component that ships with?

There are cases when the designer can't infer the base class of a user-control with VS 2005 Web Application Projects - in which case it just generates a field declaration in the code-behind of the page as type "UserControl".

To get a strongly-typed declaration of the user-control with it registered in the web.config file, you can manually add the declaration to your code-behind class (not the .designer class) of the type you want (which is typically the UserControl code-behind class name).  For example (in C#) add this to your code-behind class (and not the .designer.cs file):

    protected MyControl ctrlMyControl;

Once you do this the designer will pick this up and use it as the field declaration and you'll get full intellisense. 

Hope this helps,

Scott

Thanks, that will make life easier. :)

Can you shed any light on why the designer can't infer the base type?
What sort of things can cause this behaviour?

It depends -- sometimes it can happen if the site isn't in a buildable state at the time you add the controls (this primarily happens if the controls are themselves part of the project - and not in a separate assembly which has already been built). 

The tip I gave above, though, works regardless of whether the site is buildable or not. :-)

Thanks,

Scott

Scott,

Would this bug be fixed on SP1?

Hi Albert,

I actually just checked with the feature team, and it looks like they did specifically fix an issue in SP1 related to this.  It should make it much less likely for you to need to add the typed controls to the code-behind file.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Thank you sir for taking the time to answer my question. I'll be looking forward that change. I did download the Beta version of the SP1 and didn't fix the problem, there is any new release soon?

Again, thanks so much for your time, and sorry I missed you in Vegas!

This is correct.  I put a fix in the SP1 beta that addresses this exact problem.  If that doesn't fix it, I would guess there is an additional problem resolving the virtual path in web.config to the physical path of the .ascx file.  It would be interesting to know the following:

1) What is the physical root of the WAP?
2) Where is the physical location of the user control .ascx file?
3) Have any virtual directories been added to access the user control?
4) What is the virtual path used in web.config?
5) Are you using the vs web server or or iis?  (Only under IIS can we correctly navigate virtual directories to locate .ascx files)