Why can't Visual Studio find my WPF InitializeComponent method?

This is very strange.

I have an XAML file that looks as follows...

<Window
    x:Name="window"
    x:Class="ix.Production.Title"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    Title="Title" Height="768" Width="1024"
    Loaded="window_Loaded">

    <Window.Resources>
   etc...

And my code-beside that looks as follows...

using System;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Threading;

namespace ix.Production
{
    public partial class Title : Window
    {
        public Title()
        {
           InitializeComponent();
        }
    ....

This code refuses to compile because Visual Studio insists that the InitializeComponent "does not exist in the current context."

How can I fix this problem?

One case I have seen this happening in when you copy paste an XAML control/window, etc. The InitializeComponent method exists in a corresponding .g.cs file that is automatically generated. In my case, after copy paste, Build Action for the XAML (in Properties window) was changed to "Resource". I changed it to "Page", and it started working fine.

I hope this helps.

The thread which helped me with this was The name 'InitializeComponent' does not exist....

Your XAML says:

x:Class="ix.Production.Title"

while the actual class is ix.Outage.Title. Either change the XAML declaration or move the class to the ix.Production namespace.

So simple, but so easy to overlook: MainWindow's x:Class was set to "MainWindow", when it should have been set to namespace.MainWindow (x:Class="namespace.MainWindow"). If this is not done, then the MainWindow.g.xaml file will not include a namespace block, and the call to InitializeComponent() in MainWindow's constructor will not work.

Although this obviously isn't a solution to willem's problem, I posted it here because there are so many other solutions listed. Hopefully this will help someone else who stumbles on this post when trying to fix their problem.

Your namespaces don't match:

x:Class="ix.Production.Title"
namespace ix.Outage { ...

I usually get this problem when renaming custom control classes, or, as in your case, changing the name of the class's namespace. If you don't use Visual Studio's refactoring, then you have to manually change the names in both XAML and C# files.

Refactoring is only good when you just rename the class, for namespace rename, you have to do it manually.

For InitializeComponent, look in [Project Folder]\obj\Debug\<class_name.g.cs>.

I had the same problem with a Visual Studio 2010 sample project that I manually reverted to Visual Studio 2008. I found I had forgotten to set the Target Framework of the project to .NET Framework 3.5. It was empty in the project reverted to Visual Studio 2008, initially set to 4.0 in the original Visual Studio 2010 project.

To set Target Framework of a project, go to project properties, access the first tab called Application, and select .NET Framework 3.5 in the Target Framework dropdown.

Of course, I'd prefer Visual Studio giving me an error or at least a warning that I had not set my Target Framework, but hey, that's part of developing in Visual Studio, I guess.

I become unable to find InitializeComponent, and other XAML-related UI bits from the code behind the moment I add my PCL (which contains my data classes) into the solution.

:|

But if I remove the PCL one .. it can be found again.

Regardless, whether its found or not - I can still compile. I just can't autocomplete when i type code.

Maybe you have a PCL project in your solution? (I don't know how to fix this yet)

Your class is partial, so you should have another file that contains some other parts of your Title class (the InitializeComponent method for instance). Try to find that file, and see if the namespace in that file, is equal to the namespace of the file which contains the other parts of your class.

Looks like this was a kink in Visual Studio 2008.

If I create a new file (i.e. Title2), copy/paste the code and XAML, then change all 'Title' to 'Title2', everything works fine again.

I was strugling with the same issue here. What I did was to delete ALL the created files unde the debug folder, then rebuild the solution.

Regards, Petrus

I had come across the same problem when i got a project sample from msdn. the issue was it was a 4.0 project and i did not have the 4.0 in my system, couple of referenced dlls were missing(system.xaml and another one) removed them. tried to compile, would always throw the initializecomponent method not found. went into the project properties changed the target framework to 3.5 and it is not complaining anymore.

FWIW, I hit the same problem today after migration of a Visual Studio 2008 solution to Visual Studio 2010. It appears that the migration goofed and the projects lost their Target Framework (in Project Properties): The setting is now empty!?

Setting .NET Framework 3.5 solved the problem.

This happened to me because Visual Studio sets the "Build action" to some random action when you copy/paste or move an XAML file from one project to another within a solution.

Solution: Make sure your "Build action" is set to page for you XAML.

I hope this helps if it's the same case for you.

When namespaces are all correct changing the target platform from x86 to x64 or vice versa and rebuilding the project often does the trick.