C# – Precompiling ASP.NET Web application with MSBuild

asp.netccsprojmsbuildprecompile

I have a c# web application project in Visual Studio 2008 that I want to precompile for deployment. After looking at various options, it seems all of them have some issues – perhaps someone could give their thoughts on this:

The project is under source control and also contains a lot of files that are excluded from project.

Web Deployment Projects does not work. If I try to use a wdp to compile, aspnet_compiler.exe will also try to compile all the excluded files. I don't want to maintain an exclude list in the msbuild script.

Is there a way to tell msbuild only to use the files/items that are specified in the csproj file, copy these to an intermediate folder and have aspnet_complier.exe build from this copy that does not contain any of the excluded files?

The website has depencies to 3 other csproj files.

Thanks!

Best Answer

You can make msbuild tasks to hide (attrib +h) or delete unwanted files...

  <PropertyGroup>
    <MyLogFile>kaantologi.txt</MyLogFile>
    <MyWebSourcePath>c:\sourecontrol\myweb</MyWebSourcePath>
    <!-- *.tmp and .exclude and etc: -->
    <MyCleaup>
      attrib $(MyWebSourcePath)\*.tmp -r -s -h -a /s >>$(MyLogFile)
      del $(MyWebSourcePath)\*.tmp /q /s >>$(MyLogFile)
      attrib $(MyWebSourcePath)\*.exclude +h
    </MyCleaup>
  </PropertyGroup>
  <Target Name="MyClean">
    <Exec Command="$(MyCleaup)" />
  </Target>
  <Target Name="MyFinal">
    <Exec Command="attrib $(MyWebSourcePath)\*.exclude -h"/>
  </Target>
  <Target Name="MyBuild">
    <CallTarget Targets="MyClean" />
    <CallTarget Targets="MyCompile" /><!--...-->
    <CallTarget Targets="MyFinal" />
  </Target>

Or you can use a solution file (.sln) and have your csproj there and build that.

Ps. Not exactly your problem, but this might help (it is for web sites, not for web applications):

Unable to publish using msbuild or aspnet_compiler using cc.net

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

.net – ASP.NET Web Site or ASP.NET Web Application

Website:

The Web Site project is compiled on the fly. You end up with a lot more DLL files, which can be a pain. It also gives problems when you have pages or controls in one directory that need to reference pages and controls in another directory since the other directory may not be compiled into the code yet. Another problem can be in publishing.

If Visual Studio isn't told to re-use the same names constantly, it will come up with new names for the DLL files generated by pages all the time. That can lead to having several close copies of DLL files containing the same class name, which will generate plenty of errors. The Web Site project was introduced with Visual Studio 2005, but it has turned out not to be popular.

Web Application:

The Web Application Project was created as an add-in and now exists as part of SP 1 for Visual Studio 2005. The main differences are the Web Application Project was designed to work similarly to the Web projects that shipped with Visual Studio 2003. It will compile the application into a single DLL file at build time. To update the project, it must be recompiled and the DLL file published for changes to occur.

Another nice feature of the Web Application project is it's much easier to exclude files from the project view. In the Web Site project, each file that you exclude is renamed with an excluded keyword in the filename. In the Web Application Project, the project just keeps track of which files to include/exclude from the project view without renaming them, making things much tidier.

Reference

The article ASP.NET 2.0 - Web Site vs Web Application project also gives reasons on why to use one and not the other. Here is an excerpt of it:

You need to migrate large Visual Studio .NET 2003 applications to VS 2005? use the Web Application project.

You want to open and edit any directory as a Web project without creating a project file? use Web Site project.

You need to add pre-build and post-build steps during compilation? use Web Application project.

You need to build a Web application using multiple Web projects? use the Web Application project.

You want to generate one assembly for each page? use the Web Site project.

You prefer dynamic compilation and working on pages without building entire site on each page view? use Web Site project.

You prefer single-page code model to code-behind model? use Web Site project.

Web Application Projects versus Web Site Projects (MSDN) explains the differences between the web site and web application projects. Also, it discusses the configuration to be made in Visual Studio.