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Check out Chirpy, a very cool Add-In to run T4MVC and do many other cool things

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Just a quick post to point folks to a very cool CodePlex Add-In that you may not know about.  It’s called Chirpy and can be downloaded from https://chirpy.codeplex.com/.  The reason I discovered it is that it includes functionality to automatically run T4MVC.  In fact, it is basically the new version of the Add-In by Wayne Brantley that I blogged about a few months back.  Wayne has been working on this with Evan Nagle, who is the main owner.

But note that Chirpy does a lot more than just run T4MVC automatically!  Check out Evan’s post for a complete tutorial.  To give a really quick intro, Chirpy makes it really easy to automatically:

  • Minify your JavaScript files, using a selction of popular engines like YUI and Closure
  • Minify your CSS files
  • Process DotLess files, which make CSS files a lot DRYer.  And then of course minify the resulting CSS per previous point
  • Mash multiple files together
  • Validate Javascript and DotLess files
  • And last but not least (from my selfish point of view!) automatically run T4MVC when you save your files

But I’m really just paraphrasing Evan’s post, so just check out the details there.  I just played around with most of the functionality, and it all seems to work flawlessly.

It works for both VS 2008 and VS 2010.  Give it a try and see how you like it!

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