I was playing with the Microsoft Ajax Minifier this morning which was just released on CodePlex. I successfully got the MSBuild Task working as well as the command line tool with FinalBuilder. This is something that I have yet to successfully automate for my personal projects as part of the build process and am actually looking forward to getting this squared away.
The Microsoft Ajax Minifier essentially compresses your Javascript Files which can give your websites better performance. The description on the CodePlex Website is as follows:
“The Microsoft Ajax Minifier enables you to improve the performance of your Ajax applications by reducing the size of your JavaScript files. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier supports two levels of minification: normal crunching and hypercrunching. Normal crunching refers to the process of removing unnecessary whitespace, comments, semicolons, and curly braces. Hypercrunching refers to the process of shortening the names of local variables and removing unreachable code.
The Microsoft Ajax Minifier includes the following components:
- Command-line tool -- Enables you to minify JavaScript files from a command prompt.
- MSBuild Task -- Enables you to minify JavaScript files in a Visual Studio project automatically when performing a build.
- Component -- Enables you to to use the Microsoft Ajax Minifier programmatically.”
You can download it here.
David Hayden