Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build

Compressing JavaScript Files

If your Web applications are deploying JavaScript files, then you should process those files through a JavaScript compressor before they are placed on the IIS server. A freely available one, JSMin, can be found at http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html. JSMin offers significant compression results without modifying the actual source that is executed. Instead it performs noninvasive operations such as: remove comments and remove unnecessary white space. The JSCompress task available as a part of the MSBuildCommunityTasks incorporates JSMin to compress JavaScript files.

The WebApplication1 project from the samples includes a Scripts folder that contains some JavaScript source files. These files were taken from ...