Chirpy - VS Add In For Handling CSS, JS, DotLess and T4 Files

Introduction

We generally write a Httphandler to remove white space from a CSS and JS file or we use minifies versions of CSS and JS files. Like in jQuery they give us a min version of a JS file.

Now we don't need to write any external utility to remove white space because now we have Chirpy, which is a Visual Studio Add-in for handling CSS, JS, DotLess and T4 files.

Now let me try to explain how to use this add in.

Step 1

First go to http://nuget.org/packages/ChirpyVSI or http://chirpy.codeplex.com/ and download and install it.

Step 2

See in the following image, there is much white space:

Now we will try to remove it using Chirpy.

Step 3:

Add a new config file inside the content folder. The file name would be Bundle.chirp.config and the content will be:

<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8" ?>

<rootxmlns="urn:ChirpyConfig"xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"xsi:schemaLocation="urn:ChirpyConfig http://www.weirdlover.com/chirpy/chirp.xsd">

<FileGroupName="Site.css">

<FilePath="Site.less" />

</FileGroup>

</root>

When you create the bundle file and filegroup and file path all are correct and then it will automatically generate it. It will look like:

Now you can see as in the following image that all white space has been removed from the CSS:

Note: You can use the same bundle file for JS also.

Happy Coding.