.NET Tips and Tricksby Peter Vogel

Blog archive

Free Tool: Making Life Easier with Web Essentials

I mentioned this tool in one of my Practical JavaScript columns, but Web Essentials 2010/2012 are so useful to ASP.NET developers that I wanted to cover it here for everyone not reading that column. The primary difference between the 2010 and the 2012 versions is that the 2012 version does more.

First and foremost, Web Essentials will create bundles for you (unlike Chirpy, a previous tool from this column which will only minify your files). But Web Essentials also includes tons of support for creating CSS (I keep discovering more features, but the inline URL picker will probably remain my favorite). There are fewer features for HTML and JavaScript files (though Web Essential's support for TypeScript is essential).

Having said that, I do like regions and outlining; Web Essentials gives me both for JavaScript. I'm not a great JavaScript programmer (yet), so I also like Web Essentials' JSHint, which reminds me of JavaScript best practices.

You should get this tool.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 09/30/2013


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Creating Reactive Applications in .NET

    In modern applications, data is being retrieved in asynchronous, real-time streams, as traditional pull requests where the clients asks for data from the server are becoming a thing of the past.

  • AI for GitHub Collaboration? Maybe Not So Much

    No doubt GitHub Copilot has been a boon for developers, but AI might not be the best tool for collaboration, according to developers weighing in on a recent social media post from the GitHub team.

  • Visual Studio 2022 Getting VS Code 'Command Palette' Equivalent

    As any Visual Studio Code user knows, the editor's command palette is a powerful tool for getting things done quickly, without having to navigate through menus and dialogs. Now, we learn how an equivalent is coming for Microsoft's flagship Visual Studio IDE, invoked by the same familiar Ctrl+Shift+P keyboard shortcut.

  • .NET 9 Preview 3: 'I've Been Waiting 9 Years for This API!'

    Microsoft's third preview of .NET 9 sees a lot of minor tweaks and fixes with no earth-shaking new functionality, but little things can be important to individual developers.

  • Data Anomaly Detection Using a Neural Autoencoder with C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research tackles the process of examining a set of source data to find data items that are different in some way from the majority of the source items.

Most   Popular

Subscribe on YouTube