I'm building a CDN, and looking for a ways to utilize .NET minification/bundling mechanism (System.Web.Optimization) there.
The question is how can I return minified bundle from MVC controller.
Note: I'm looking to use native .NET 4.5 capabilities, I do not want 3rd party solutions.
I'm only looking for ways to utilize this on CDN side. Not on client application side.
Additional question: If the above is possible at all, please explain how can I take advantage of caching, which is normally achieved through adding unique query string parameter to request.
The asp.net bundling and minification uses WebGrease internally.
Grab it off nuget and add just start using it. It looks like the codeplex site doesnt have any examples on there so you will need to look at the source code or download/decompile the asp.net source code to see how they use it.
For the query string parameter I believe that is mainly to prevent/aid client side caching it doesnt neccessarily have anything to do with your server side.
You haven't said how you plant to serve up the JS files from your custom CDN so I can't help much with the caching, I would highly suggest not serving them through mvc though, there will be a lot of extra things happening in the pipeline that you dont really need if all you're doing is serving static files.
Perhaps look at having some process that parses the files and sticks them in a certain directory that IIS can serve directly without delegating to asp.net
Related
I'm creating an application with a .Net Web Api project wanting to use pure AngularJS as the client side. Since Web Api is built on top of MVC, it creates MVC specific and default items that I feel is not needed. These items include the HomeController, _ViewStart.cshtml, _layout.cshtml, etc. I tried removing them but it comes up with errors. Has anyone tried to remove the MVC stuff out of the web api project and used separate client side front-end? Is it even possible to remove the MVC items without errors?
Remove RouteConfig.cs from App_Start, remove the Views directory and all sub-directories including the Views internal web.config file. Comment out or delete all the lines in the Global.asax.cs Application_Start method except GlobalConfiguration.Configure(WebApiConfig.Register). Remove the HomeController, add an index.html and any needed Angular scripts and go at it. I also added solution folders to organize my views as reusing the existing Views folders did not work. I'm using VS 2015 but is should work for 2013 also. PWE
Web API is not built on top of MVC.
The default templates bring in MVC for the sake of supporting a help page, but you don't need to use it.
You can start with an empty web project and just check Web API.
The routing piece is server routing and it's part of what maps the URL to Controllers+Actions, it has nothing to do with Angular routing.
As Mike Cheel alluded to, there are no dependencies between MVC and Web API. However, if you use the built-in templates, it's easy to get the impression that the 2 are linked. They include a lot of stuff in these templates because they can't anticipate where you want to go with your project... so they try to cover all the bases.
For your purposes, you would probably be better off to start with an empty project and add only the components that you actually need. For this approach, some of the best tutorials and starter projects are from Taiseer Joudeh's "Bit of Technology" blog. His tutorials helped me to build an "MVC Free" web application from scratch that uses JSON Web Tokens and AngularJS Interceptors for security and Web API 2 and Entity Framework to serve up the data.
He has many tutorials on his website... but you might want to start with "AngularJS Token Authentication using ASP.NET Web API 2, Owin, and Identity". What what.. you didn't ask about security? Well... security is an issue that you will need to confront at some point anyway... and Taiseer presents a nice solution for securing an Angular/Web API application.
Im bulding a website using MVC4. Recently I've read about TypeScript. It looks really nice however I cannot find any use for it in a MVC website. Am I missing something? Do you use it? Where?
TypeScript is a pre-compiler for JavaScript. Hence you can use TypeScript only as a replacement for JavaScript (server-side, e.g. Node.js, or client-side, i.e. in the browser).
As you are probably writing MVC4 code with C#, TypeScript will be of no use for you in relation to MVC4.
Regarding the client-side it's somewhat different.
I guess the main point you need to know is that TypeScript is not (yet) just another language on the server, that you can exchange with C#.
I find it quite useful for building largish apps with lots of logic on the client. The interfaces help avoid some errors. It compiles to javascript so you could use it instead of javascript. If you're just writing a couple of lines I wouldn't bother though.
You can link to the generated javascript files from TS files directly in the script bundles or HTML. If you want to automatically link to many JS files, use require JS. This will save you having to link to many js files.
I want to build a simple site with MVC but then render the "pages" and corresponding "assets" (js, css, images, etc) to what one might call a "static site".
In other words, I don't want to deploy to an IIS server that supports MVC. I simply want to build the site in MVC then somehow parse those pages into static html/css/etc files and upload the site to a regular LAMP host.
Is there an easy way to automate this? NuGet package? Binary? MVC extension like maybe a handler add-on that can render out the static site in a single pass?
About 10 years back, I used to download whole websites for offline use using HTTrack Website Copier. May be you could download your own website which gives you nice hierarchy of your static web pages. If you think all your webpages are reachable through the homepage links, menu links etc then you can download most of your website. Basically you can google for web crawlers/ offline browsers/website downloaders etc. and run them to get your job done.
Alternatively if you know the pattern of urls, you could give it to download manager to download them. Not sure if it works with your website, but I do it sometimes.
HTH
If your site depends on a database or some other dynamic source it will be close to impossible to dump all possible combinations of pages into static files. If on the other hand your site is pretty much static, saving the rendered HTML/JS/CSS source into files and uploading it to a LAMP server won't be too hard.
You may wanna look at Pretzel, a .Net static site generator.
Update: Apparently it doesn't work on ASP.Net projects: Issue #123. It only supports Razor language for authoring content pages.
If the reason for doing this is performance related why not just use output caching and the like, that way the pages will be extremely fast (you could set the cache timeout to a very long period of time) and you don't need to run some tool to do the conversion and have to store your html separate to your source code.
Of course you will still need to run IIS/.net
You have three options:
Create your website using plain html, css, jquery and images. You can use Visual Studio Code as IDE to create the files. One issue might be to manage common header/footer for your website. But you can solve it by injecting html header/footer using jquery.
Use a CMS (content management system) like Umbraco to host your static site. Umbraco indexes and caches pages to improve performance. You have great control on what to publish on your website etc.
Create the website using .Net + MVC and use tools like HTTrack to download a static copy of the website. You can even automate the process using commands and triggering it after every deployment or build etc.
I am considering using .NET MVC for my next web app but one of the requirements is that there should be minimum work involved from the clients side (who will be maintaining the site).
They are used to simple HTML sites where all they have to do in order to make a minor change is to modify an html in notepad and upload it.
What parts of an .NET web app needs to be compiled? Is it only the .cs parts of it? Can all the rest be updated freely by modifying files with e.g. notepad?
Also, in an MVC environment, is more of the view related code in compiled files?
How is this kind of maintenance usually done in such cases where the client will take over the site on delivery (and are not interested in needing VS installed and needing to compile!)?
If you really need a web application, then in order to make changes to the 'application' part, they're going to need to be able to recompile.
If they're going to make visual changes, then your best bet is to provide a method for them to edit the HTML of the site. You can make changes to the views (.aspx files) in ASP.NET MVC without having to recompile. If you make changes to your controllers or your Model, then you'll have to recompile.
If this is a major requirement for your client, you can build the site using ASP.Net Web Forms instead of ASP.NET MVC in which case changes to the .cs files will be compiled on the fly when the page is first accessed. Note that this only applies to the .cs files in your Web Forms project. Any .cs files in referenced assemblies will need to be pre-compiled.
That said, I suspect your client is primarily interested in modifying the look/feel/content of a page, so they would probably be satisfied modifying the .aspx files in either a Web Forms or MVC app.
If they have the budget for it, sounds like the best solution is to build a Content Management System, so they don't have to edit files ever again.
When creating an empty MVC 2 project, I have a lot of javascript files in my Scripts folder. Why? Will removing them affect my application?
No removing them won't affect anything, unless they are being used in pages. However you said this is an empty MVC project so you'll be fine.
They're there for you to use, to make your life easier. For example, JQuery is included.
Take for example JQuery file, It provieds functions which has solutions for crossbrowser related issues which makes developement easy. Similarly other files has functions whcih are providing readymade functionalities which can be used for rapid developement.
Unfortunatly as JS is traveling to browsers its downloaded on the client. Its suprising for not JS people as its not like .NET api where one or more dll is sufficient for all the api and developer dont have to worry(some times :)) about from where they are coming.
I will suggest you to study included JS files and include/use only those which you really wanted to use.