Visual Studio 2015 - Shared Projects Reference Tab Missing on Web Project

Question

I upgraded to Visual Studio 2015 from our MSDN subscription because I was pretty excited to read about Shared Projects... No more managing 21382 nuget packages in our dependencies when all we want to do is reuse code.

So I built a test shared project with some code in it. Then I add a new empty web application on .Net 4.6 to the project. Now I expected to go to references and see a "Shared Projects" tab on the references window, but I do not see one.

Now I can add a class library to the same solution and I see the tab and can add the shared reference. However I cannot add the shared project to my web application.

I was rather hoping I could use this concept to share views with multiple MVC projects.

Am I missing something here, or are shared projects not compatible with Web Projects?

The only way I see around this is to have two projects for every web application I build. 1 for the code, and 1 for the content.

For example

XYZ.SomeWebSite.Code (Class Library Project Type) -> references Shared Project
XYZ.SomeWebSite (Web Project Type)

However going this route, I would not be able to push views, text files, css files, javascript files, etc into the web application.

I submitted a frown on this issue with details... Hopefully this is an oversite... It's starting to appear like Shared Projects and Protable Class Libraries were created specifically for Windows Store Apps and Windows Phone 8 mindsets... — Ryan Mann
Just found an RTM Release notes: visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2015-vs.aspx Web Project type is not listed as supported, but it's from the RTM, not finding anything on the release. — Ryan Mann
I noticed the exact same thing last week. Kind of annoying. We've got three web portal applications and would like to centralize our assets (css, images, themes, fonts). Shared projects seemed like a great way to solve the problem but when I tried to add reference saw the same thing you did. <sad trombone> — Craig W.
I recently came accross a problem in a production environment where I think using shared projects is bad for IIS Websites, and maybe that's why it's not there. I was told to spin up 2 sites in one app pool, and it blew up on me because my code was compiled into both sites via shared projects. They could not both load in the same app pool because all the types would exist twice... I was able to convince them to run 2 separate app pools, but it was still a light bulb moment as to why it could be bad. — Ryan Mann
Related feature request - developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/12592/… — resnyanskiy

Ryan Mann Ryan Mann · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-03T21:01:51

[Temporary Answer]

I was able to work around the problem by manually editing the csproj file for my web application.

Here are the steps:

Unload the web application project
Edit the *.csproj file by right clicking the project and clicking edit...
Now look for the ProjectTypeGuids element.

{349C5851-65DF-11DA-9384-00065B846F21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}

The first guid is the guid for an ASP.Net MVC 5 Project, and the 2nd guid is for C#.

All you need to do is temporarily remove the first guid and the semicolon, leaving just the c# guid (the 2nd one).

Reload the project and add your shared projects. Once they are all added, edit the project file and put the first guid and the semicolon back.

Reload the project.

The Shared Project reference will still be there, and it will build and link into your web application.

Optionally, you can just manually add the shared project referrence, the format is like this

<Import Project="..\XYZ.UPlugin\XYZ.Plugin.projitems" Label="Shared" />

Visual Studio 2015 - Shared Projects Reference Tab Missing on Web Project

1 Answers