MVC Razor view Intellisense broken in VS 2013/2015/2017

Question

I have an existing project written in VS2010 which when loaded in VS2010 works perfectly.

When I load this same project in VS2013 the MVC Razor views contain lots of

Answer 1

A few of my projects had this issues for months. I tried so many workarounds and nothing worked. The issues seemed to be with the projects: the same project will have Intellisense issue across all PCs with Visual Studio. Finally I came through this post: http://www.dennisonpro.info/managing-intellisense-in-razor-views-with-mvc-5-using-custom-builds-in-visual-studio-2013/

In our case the cause was the output directory of all those projects were changed to other than "bin\". By changing the OutputPath back to "bin\" (and cleaning the project, closing then re-opening Visual Studio), I got Intellisense back.

The post referenced above also provided a workaround to maintain a separate output directory while still having Intellisense.

Hope this helps someone someday.