For the past couple of years, Web Essentials have been including features for bundling and minifying JS and CSS files as well as compiling LESS, Sass and CoffeeScript. As of Web Essentials 2015 that is no longer the case. However, I’ve gotten so many requests to bring these features back that I’ve created two new Visual Studio 2015 extensions to deal with it. And I need your help testing them before Visual Studio 2015 goes RTM.

Bundler & Minifier

This extension allows you to perform bundling and minification of JS, CSS and HTML files very easily and, in my mind, takes a better approach to how it’s done over the same feature in Web Essentials.

Download from VS Gallery Bundler & Minifier
Download nightly CI builds from vsixgallery.com
Source code on GitHub  
 

Web Compiler

Based on what I learned building compilers for Web Essentials, this extension improves on the stability and usability significantly. You can now very easily specify which LESS/Sass/CoffeeScript files to compile and with what settings for each file individually.

Read more and download Web Compiler
Download nightly CI builds from vsixgallery.com
Source code on GitHub 

Why new extensions?

In the past year or so, I’ve started separating out features from Web Essentials into smaller single-purpose extensions. I’ve done that for several reasons.

1. It keeps the Web Essentials source code smaller and more maintainable
2. Since it’s smaller, I hope to get more contributions from the community
3. If one feature in Web Essentials cause a crash/hang, then the entire extension is broken
4. Issues are much easier to deal with in smaller extensions
5. By having smaller extensions, you can install just the ones you need

The code in Web Essentials for dealing with Bundling, minification and compiling was very error prone and almost impossible to maintain. For several months I wasn’t even able to compile Web Essentials itself due to a lot of weirdness in the node.js based compilers being used.

Help wanted

Given that these two extensions are brand new and the amount of requests for them has been so immense, it becomes really important that they both are working awesomely when Visual Studio 2015 goes RTM. So please help me test them out by installing them and reporting any issues to their GitHub issue tracker. If you want to contribute then you’re more than welcome to send pull requests with modifications and/or unit tests. If you want to add new features, all I ask is that you open an issue first so we can discuss it before sending the pull request.

These extensions are for a huge portion of Visual Studio web developers who don’t want to setup Grunt/Gulp to handle the client-side workflows, but instead have happily relied on Web Essentials in the past. These extensions are for you.

A few months ago I wrote about some small handy extensions I created for Visual Studio. This is part 2 with even more handy extensions. So here are some of the extensions I’ve worked on since then.

Open Command Line

Though I’m not a console-person, I do use both PowerShell and the regular command line quite a bit. Mostly I use the command line to run Grunt commands or with other commands that have to do with my Visual Studio projects.

The problem is that I always have to cd my way to the root of my projects before I start executing any commands.

With the Open Command Line extension I can now just hit Alt+Space  to open my console of choice already on the path of my project root. It supports any console including PowerShell, cmd, Bash etc.

Download Open Command Line on the VS Gallery

Open from Azure Websites

Sometimes when I build websites, I need to download the deployed content and run it locally. That’s a little cumbersome to do manually, so this extension helps make this super easy.

The extensions adds an Open from Azure Websites button that does it all automatically and opens the remote website as a project in Visual Studio.

Download Open from Azure Website on the VS Gallery 

Visual Studio Auto Updater

I love Visual Studio extensions and I use a lot of them every day. However, it can sometimes be annoying to keep them all up-to-date when new versions are released.

The Visual Studio Auto Updater will automatically download and install updates to extensions in the background so you don’t ever have to do it manually again. It will only update the extensions that you have approved for auto updating.

Download Visual Studio Auto Updater on the VS Gallery

All of these extensions are of course open source and available on either my GitHub profile or on the LigerShark profile.