Compile Your ASP.Net MVC Views

A big problem with ASP.Net MVC views is the amount of inline code you put in your views that could potentially result in errors that aren't apparent until runtime. Microsoft did spot this as a problem and kindly introduced a way of checking your views for compilation errors when you compile your source, here's how to enable the feature:

Open up your project file for editing either in Visual Studio by right clicking the project file and choosing 'Edit Project File' or just use your favourite text editor. At the top of the project file you'll see a PropertyGroup XML element with a child element of MvcBuildViews, change the value of this to true...

 true

This results in a build event at the bottom of your project file getting called...

That's it! You now are that little bit more confident in your deploys :)

Further Points

Increase in Build Time and How to Avoid

This will add an overhead to your builds, so depending on the size of your MVC project this could extend your build time substantially. However, thanks to a discussion with some other team members at Esendex (Alex and Jon) there is a way of avoiding the overhead the majority of the time. Create a new project configuration in Visual Studio, called something like Debug with Views Compilation. This will add a new PropertyGroup section in your project file for this configuration. Set the MvcBuildViews element to true in this new section. Remember to ensure the default section value for MvcBuildViews is false but set the release section value to true.

   false



   true



   true

Quite useful if you are working within your MVC app and not changing the views at all.

Problems with Non-Standard Project Builds

If you are building a standard MVC project on a developer machine then everything should work fine. If your MVC project isn't standard you may find you have to play with the PhysicalPath part of the AspNetCompiler. To get our CI build machine building this project I had to change the PhysicalPath value to $(WebProjectOutputDir), this value is passed in as a parameter when calling the build on your project.

MSBuild.exe myproject.web.csproj /target:Rebuild,ResolveReferences,_CopyWebApplication /p:Configuration=Release;
Architecture=x86;WebProjectOutputDir=build\release\web\;OutDir=build\release\web\bin\ 

Hope this info is useful to someone out there!