Minifying and combining files in .net

Question

I am looking at implementing some performance optimization around my javascript/css. In particular looking to achieve the minification and combining of such. I am developing

Answer 1

We have done something similar with several ASP.NET web applications. Specifically, we use the Yahoo Yui compressor, which has a .NET library version which you can reference in your applications.

The approach we took was to generate the necessary merged/minified files at runtime. We wrapped all this logic up into an ASP.NET control, but that isn't necessary depending on your project.

• The first time a request is made for a page, we process through the list of included JS and CSS files. In a separate thread (so the original request returns without delay) we then merged the included files together (1 for JS, 1 for CSS), and then apply the Yui compressor.
• The result is then written to disk for fast reference in the future
• On subsequent requests, the page first looks for the minified versions. If found, it just serves those up. If not, it goes through the process again.

As some icing to the cake:

• For debug purposes, if the query string ?debug=true is present, the merged/minified resources are ignored and the original individual files are served instead (since it can be hard to debug optimized JS)

We have found this process to work exceptionally well. We built it into a library so all our ASP.NET sites can take advantage. The post-build scripts can get complicated if each page has different dependencies, but the run-time can determine this quite easily. And, if someone needs to make a quick fix to a CSS file, they can do so, delete the merged versions of the file, and the process will automatically start over without need to do post-build processing with MSBuild or NAnt.