We are actively developing a website using .Net and MVC and our testers are having fits trying to get the latest stuff to test. Every time we modify the style sheet or external javascript files, testers need to do a hard refresh (ctrl+F5 in IE) in order to see the latest stuff.
Is it possible for me to force their browsers to get the latest version of these files instead of them relying on their cached versions? We’re not doing any kind of special caching from IIS or anything.
Once this goes into production, it will be hard to tell clients that they need to hard refresh in order to see the latest changes.
Thanks!
You need to modify the names of the external files you refer to. For e.g. add the build number at the end of each file, like style-1423.css and make the numbering a part of your build automation so that the files and the references are deployed with a unique name each time.