Question

I am working on a big .NET project. I am currently creating an automated minifier for JS and CSS files using YUI compressor. After doing some research, I found that the heaviest files in the project are actually .NET resources (Like MS ajax file). They are very big and unminified.

I am wondering, is there any way to minify them?

Thanks

Answer 1

Yep – there’s definitely a way to minify and/or combine any JavaScript and/or Cascading Style Sheets for your ASP.NET application.

But before I drop some links, etc… if you’re using some of the major JavaScript framework’s, like jQuery, MSAjax, whatever.. they all usually have minified version available to download .. and some of them are available on CDNs .. which means you don’t need to minify/combine them in your solution.

Here is a list of major JavaScript libraries cached on the MS CDN.

Now, finally for some info about how to minify/combine ASP.NET solutions.

This link has some documentation about how to make an MSBuild.xml file which is used to defines all the configuration settings/options for YUICompressor.NET.

While this link is a video I made about how to do this with TFS2008 and Continuous Integration.