Visual Studio – Build Every Time JS and CSS Changes?

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I am relatively new to Visual Studio Development and I was wondering – it seems that everytime I make changes to my JS or CSS in my project – I have to "build" the project again.

Is there any way to simply refresh the browser as opposed to building everytime ? My understanding is that all the files are copied to some temporary directory but I was hoping that I can quickly debug/write JS and CSS within the solution and just refresh the browser to see the changes ?

Best Answer

In my experience, all you need to do is save the CSS/JS files and refresh the browser (hard refresh, not using the browser cache).

The reasons this will not work can be many, but mostly to do with any processing that the files need to go through before the go to the browser - say bundling, minification, usage of ScriptManager or any such server side work (including required deployment) on the files before they are available to the browser.

After chat, we confirmed that the OP is using ScriptManager with CSS/JS, causing the issue.

It is possible that using bundling instead would solve this.

Related Solutions

Visual Studio – Dynamic Post-Build Event Setup

(Edited in response to comments)

The trick to getting a consistent build when reusing projects across solutions is to try and identify a known, common root and work relative to there. In your place the common root would seem to be the video server project.

Instead of using $(SolutionDir) in your video project (post build event?), try and do something with the video servers $(ProjectDir) - that will always be set no matter what solution it lives in. From your example something like this should resolve to the same place as $(SolutionDir) - you'll probably have to play with quotes and leading\trailing backslashes - I can't remember what the VS macros do with those now.

cd "$(ProjectDir)..\"
start DocumentationBuilder

Visual Studio – Why Use MSBuild Instead of Solution Files?

First point of fact is that the solution file pretty much magically becomes a MSBuild file when MSBuild executes it -- which is what happens when you build the solution in visual studio. In addition, all those project files are just msbuild files managed by visual studio. In fact, the project files handle most of the real dirty work here no matter if you are building from solutions or building from a custom msbuild script.

We also use TeamCity to build and publish applications and we will typically end up with custom msbuild scripts for most projects. The role these scripts play -- which isn't really easy with a solution file -- is packaging the project for deployment or distribution. Typically these scripts handle some more operational aspects of things -- like building the web project to a particular folder or copying in the running configurations as opposed to the development configurations. The heavy lifting tends to be handled in the project files themselves -- the build script just references those, we don't try and recreate that wheel. Overall it works great and it isn't really much duplicated code. Typically once we get the build scripts up we rarely have to touch them until there are massive changes in a project mandating massively changing the build.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Visual Studio – Dynamic Post-Build Event Setup

Visual Studio – Why Use MSBuild Instead of Solution Files?

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