Why did my css not work until added to project?

Question

I have an asp.net mvc project, and I replaced the default css the wizard built with the iui css and javascript package. They were placed in ~/Content/iui/ folder. When i ran the site through the dev web server, the css didnt get used. I managed to fix it by adding the iui folder to the project in the project explorer. That's all I did, the pages already the script and style tags set up properly.

What is going on here? I'm sure MSVS is up to something behind the scenes, and I'd like to understand why it did this and why what I did produced the behaviour that it did.

Answer 1

Look in the "property pages" for your website project (VS Menu: Website -> Startup Options). Under "MSBuild Options", the "output folder" setting is the path that the Visual Studio Dev Web Server uses when you run it. Only files that are part of the project get copied to this directory.

This is the reason why even though, you added the files to correct folder, it was not the one that the Dev Web Server was looking at.