Question

I have a pre-build event in a web project in Visual Studio (2012 but same behaviour in 2010).

The prebuild invoke a simple exe which look for every filename.aspx.vb file if there is a matching filename.html in the folder.

If it does, it just read the filename.html as a string (escaped and minified) and inject it as a string also in the finename.aspx.vb something like :

myStribBuilder.Append(“This is where the html code from the external file is going”)

Let say i made a modification on filename.html I save and I compile and test the website. It should reflect the latest change when calling filename.aspx

Here what happens :

• If I have a very light project with one page or two, it does work. It compiles fine as expected.

• Then project get bigger and it doesn’t work anymore. I mean code is injected but not compiled as expected, if I refresh filename.aspx on webserver I will still have same version but if I open filename.aspx.vb on VS the code is in there. Second compilation works 100% ok.

I can live with that but I have to compile TWICE each time for testing purpose after html files changes.
This doesn’t make sense to me.

What “pre-build” means if in fact it seems to cache the code right on compilation request before executing the prebuild routine.

So, how can I be sure to inject code in my *.vb file before compilation begins ?

Answer 1

I figured out the problem was not VS not waiting for exe to complete on prebuild, but rather having the filename.aspx.vb opened when compiling.

The code update itself on the IDE (with options set to autoupdate externally modified opened page) but I guess the compile process keep the pre-build version of the opened file, which make sense in a way.

If I close the file before compiling it is ok.

Now I wonder if there is a workaround to this, but I understand it is not common practice to externally modify on the fly opened files in IDE before compilation. I do however rely heavily on this technique.