After finishing this post I ran into all sorts of other strange issues and restarted using a Web Appliction instead of a plain old Website.  Between IntelliSense not showing any classes, to project reference issues, I couldn’t figured it out in time.  I’m sure there’s a way, I just had to move on.  So maybe this ramble below will be helpful for someone.

Just ran into something quirky with Visual Studio 2008′s new ADO.NET Entity Data Model wizard.  While working on an ASP.NET 3.5 website ( not a codebehind web application ) I was trying to get the ADO.NET Entity Data model wizard to work with MySQL and ran into a probable Visual Studio bug.  To sum up the issue, if you are going to add a new edmx to your project, do NOT save it to the App_Code folder initially.  Put it in your root folder, compile your project, then move the edmx where you’d like.

Assuming you’ve already created your ASP.NET Website project, here’s how you reproduce this issue.

Right click your project and left click ‘Add New Item’

Add New Item

Select ADO.NET Entity Data Model, name it, select your language of preference

ADO.NET Entity Data Model

Click Yes to the ‘Store in App_Code’ prompt

Place file in 'App_Code' folder

Complete the new Entity Data Model wizard

See this tutorial if you have not done this before

Compile project after completing wizard

Invalid token 'void' in class, struct, or interface member declaration

At this point your project should have a new.edmx file located inside of the App_Code folder, but the project won’t build without failing.  If you are stuck in this predicament, follow this workaround.

Move .edmx to root folder and rebuild

WORKAROUND : move edmx to root folder, then recompile

After moving your edmx file to the root folder you should be able to compile without problem.  Assuming this solves your problem, you should be able to move your edmx file to the App_Code folder without problem.  Seems like an initial compile problem.