Resolve "Member Name Cannot Be the Same as Enclosing Type" Error

Today one of my colleagues was working to create a new project to learn something. He is a novice in C# and knows little about C# programming and the basic structure of naming the file names.

He supposedly named the file as a generic name; i.e., he named it Profile. aspx and continued to work. At some point, he later on added the features and some data-oriented architecture to streamline his work and then tried to build the project but the project was not building up he discussed this with some guys near his workstation for guidance but they couldn't help.

So I jumped in, and later on, after checking the title of the error I thought, it was the same nature of error I have faced several times during my work, so I have diagnosed and fixed it. I want to share the full story of how I did it and I have come up with two cases to check and resolve the error.

So let's move forward to first create the error scenario and then resolve it later on.

To do our task we need to create a new project.

Open the Visual Studio instance by Pressing the Windows Key + R typing devenv.exe and pressing the OK button, it opens up the new instance.

Create a New Website by File > New > Website or Press Shift + Alt + N.

Let's create a new page (press Ctrl + Shift + A), as I thought I would create a project with the functionality of signup, login, and user profile. so I created pages of the functionalities I required and I named them Signup.aspx, Login. aspx and Profile. aspx to do my task.

Before proceeding, as previously discussed we have two cases for this issue.

Case 1 (Page)

In case one we have named the Page profile. aspx and as you are aware Profile is a built-in Type which originates from System.Web.Profile.

Let's build the solution. What happened now? Oh Ho! It throws an exception.

So in this case if you name the page with this type which is built into C# it throws the exception of type "member name cannot be same as enclosing type".

Check the image for better reference.

As you can see the Error Description elaborates that 'Profile' member names cannot be the same as their enclosing type, the first enclosed character is the type that is the same as the enclosing type, which is Profile also.

According to MSDN "The members of a class or struct cannot have the same name as the class or struct, unless the member is a constructor."

The syntax of the error is 'user-defined type' : member names cannot be the same as their enclosing type

Resolution

You need to rename the file to UserProfile.aspx and then build and check it.

Woah, the build succeeded and it resolved the issue. Let's move on to the second case.

Case 2

The second case lies in the method used on the page. After renaming or adding a new page to the solution case 1 is resolved. Now in the second case, we want to write some method under the inherited class, but this time we also use the same name as the page name.

public partial class UserProfile : System.Web.UI.Page  
{  
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)  
    {  

    }  

    public void UserProfile()  
    {  
        Response.Write("New Method Added");  
    }  
}  

Let's see what happened.

As you can see it throws the same error.

This time what happened is you named a method the same as your page name, so as per the law under class, the member names are not the same as their enclosing types; in our case, the UserProfile is the enclosing type.

Resolution

To resolve this error we should rename it to something different from our class name so let's do that -- I have renamed it to GetUserProfile and see if this can resolve our error.

Build the solution and check the result.

Yes, we have resolved the error. That's great.

So today we have seen the common error and its resolution.

Now it's your turn -- if you have any cases then let me know I will add it to this resource.