YUI Compressor and .NET Apps

Question

I want to use YUI Compressor (the original) and use it as part of typical MS build processes (Visual Studio 2008, MSBuild).

Does anyone have any guidance or thoughts on

Answer 1

I use both. The YUI compressor is command-line, and easy to integrate into any build process. I got it running in rake with no problems.

It's probably most common to perform the javascript/css compression in-place when you deploy. That way you don't have to update JS references. But I'm using another method on my site. I have the compressed files created as *-min.js, etc. To include a script or css file on my page, I call a server-side method:

<%= ScriptSrc("~/assets/myscript.js") %>
<%= LinkSrc("~/assets/main.css") %>

These methods do the following:

1. Expand the app-relative path
2. add a version string to the end (for cache invalidation)
3. choose between the full script and a minified version depending on whether we are in debug mode or not.

In debug mode, ScriptSrc might output something like this:

but in production it would load the minified version:

One of the benefits of this is that I can switch between the full and minified versions just by changing the web.config, which can aid debugging.