ASP.NET controls cannot be referenced in code-behind in Visual Studio 2008

Question

Ok, so, my visual studio is broken. I say this NOT prematurely, as it was my first response to see where I had messed up in my code. When I add controls to the page I can\'t

Answer 1

I had this happen a few times and it happened again today for a new reason. I normally run my project through IIS but needed to run it locally to debug. I normally run on port 80 in IIS and 81 in debug, but I had some settings in the web.config that used 80 so I just killed the site in IIS and switched the website to port 80 in the project settings. For whatever reason, this messed everything up and created the problem described in the OP. I started trying things one by one, including all the advice mentioned here, but switching the port back to 81 in the project settings is what ended up working.