It pains me to write this post as I feel like an idiot for having wasted my time on this “problem.”  Hopefully in posting this, I can keep some other poor lost soul working at 4 AM in the morning from spending wasteful minutes scratching his head and getting frustrated.  The Visual Studio designer will work fine in resolving namespaces, but when you build you will get the “Type or namespace ‘xyz’ does not exist error.  If you see this error please take a look at your Errors List window and ensure that you have the “Warnings” option enabled.  It is very likely that you will see that there is a missing dependent reference.