I'm just going through a conversion of a largish project that has about 50+ pages. I went through Scott's step by step tutorial. Copied files, added references, then used the conversion.

Now a good chunk of the project ASPX files converted just fine, but many others - especially those in subdirectories did not. I get:

Generation Designer file failed: Unable to load one or more of the requested types. Retireve the LoaderExceptions property for more information.

I noticed a couple of problems here. First when I REBUILD the project - the BIN folder is not getting build first, so in my case the bin folder was empty. which would possibly account for not finding the assemblies of some of the control classes.

But even after manually copying the various bin assemblies - I still don't get any further.

Looking at thte pages that are failing they are inheriting from a base form class in another assembly. So just for kicks I created a type in the Web project and then have the pages inherit from that, but that still doesn't work. This same approach works on a number of the pages that do compile.

It sure would be useful if the thing would tell me waht type couldn't be loaded!

+++ Rick ---      

Ok, so this problem sort of fixed it self. After all sorts of fiddling with the problem pages eventually one page started compiling and all the rest did as well.

I still think this is related to the BIN directory and dependent assemblies not being loaded properly. I think what did it in the end was opening one of the pages in the designer and forcing the control assembly that contained one of the base Page classes to load, but I can't be sure...

I posted a long entry about this conversion here in case anybody is interested:

http://west-wind.com/weblog/posts/5378.aspx

+++ Rick ---