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 this? For example, good ways for incorporating into project, what to do with existing CSS and JS references, and the like.
I am happy to hear on the benefits of YUI Compressor .NET and alternatives but I'm mor einterested in use of the original.
Thanks Scott
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:
In debug mode, ScriptSrc might output something like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://stage.myapp.com/assets/myscript.js?v=1.2" ></script>
but in production it would load the minified version:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://stage.myapp.com/assets/myscript-min.js?v=1.2" ></script>
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.
Because the YUI Compressor is simply a command line tool, you could call it as part of a Pre or Post Build action. (If you delve deep enough into MSBuild, you can let it run only when the files have changed, speeding up your regular builds; VS is pretty lenient when it comes to customized MSBuild actions in your project file.)
You could use Gabe's answer as a guideline on how to develop using such a setup; you could also during the Render of, say, a master page translate all non-minified url's in your <head> with minified url's (a little tricky though, as <script> tags will show up in the middle of the Text property of LiteralControls).
Please reference this article: How to use Visual Studio's Post-build Event with YUI Compressor for .NET
If you're willing to use NAnt, or have the time to convert the code to MSBuild, here is a free and open source task implementation based on .NET libraries for YUI compressor, which we released recently (because we couldn' find any ourselves): http://code.google.com/p/eksi-tasks/