Could not load type from assembly error

Is the assembly in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) or any place the might be overriding the assembly that you think is being loaded? This is usually the result of an incorrect assembly being loaded, for me it means I usually have something in the GAC overriding the version I have in bin/Debug.

If you have one project referencing another project (such as a 'Windows Application' type referencing a 'Class Library') and both have the same Assembly name, you'll get this error. You can either strongly name the referenced project or (even better) rename the assembly of the referencing project (under the 'Application' tab of project properties in VS).

I had the same issue and for me it had nothing to do with namespace or project naming.

But as several users hinted at it had to do with an old assembly still being referenced.

I recommend to delete all "bin"/binary folders of all projects and to re-build the whole solution. This washed out any potentially outdated assemblies and after that MEF exported all my plugins without issue.

I ended up having an old reference to a class (an HttpHandler) in web.config that was no longer being used (and was no longer a valid reference). For some reason it was ignored while running in Studio (or maybe I have that class still accessible within my dev setup?) and so I only got this error once I tried deploying to IIS.

I searched on the assembly name in web.config, removed the unused handler reference, then this error went away and everything works great.