I was migrating my ASP.NET application from v1.0 to v2.0 when I came across this interesting issue. I have a template class which is used by all asp.net pages in the project. Therefore, I placed it in App_Code folder. This template class is having a friend method which is not exposed to the asp.net page. When I tried using this method in my page it says the method is private and so cannot be accessed outside parent class. Any suggestions on why it is considering friend as private????

hi sandeep,
  Check whether your class's default constructor is private or not.

Note - (C#: internal)/(VB: Friend) allows access only within the assembly.

nalaka hewage

When the web site is dynamically compiled, all the classes in the App_Code directory are compiled together into a single assembly (or possibly one assembly for each class). Let's call this assembly A (for App_code).

When you request the page, the parsed markup and codebehind are compiled into another assembly (again, maybe 2, 1 for markup 1 for codebehind or maybe just 1 single that contains both). Let's call this assembly P (for page).

The important part here is that the App_code and page classes in question are in different assemblies which are created at runtime.

Your Friend keyword ('internal' in C#) is behaving as designed. The class method is internal to assembly A and not publicly visible to assembly P.

If you used a web application project, every class in your project (including code-behind, but excluding the dynamically generated classes based on the markup parsing) are included in the assembly, thus making Friend/internal members visible.

You need to make any class members in App_code public if you wish to use on them in pages. Or you can switch to a web app project.

-Peter