Disable Minification with MVC 4 Bundles

I decided to play around with a bunch of new technologies to dive in and learn today. I decided to write a basic blog app (yeah, boring, I know) using the following tools:

• Visual Studio 11 Beta
• ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta
• Single Page Application
• Bundles (new combining/minification stuff)
• Web API
• Twitter Bootstrap 2.0
• Modernizr
• MvcScaffolding
• etc…

    (TL;DR? Click Here)

Released: JsTrace.MVC

I just released the JsTrace add-on JsTrace.MVC as a NuGet package.

What is it?  It's a way to automatically proxy JsTrace messages from client-side JavaScript to your MVC application.

Basically, when you add this package, you get the following Area added to your ASP.NET MVC project:


The JsTraceController has a single "Index" method that receives a JsTraceMessage object.  All that contains is the module, level and message sent from the JavaScript side.
Given the following javascript:

var tracer = new Trace('TestModule');
tracer.error('testing: error message');

The default implementation just outputs to the console using Debug.WriteLine:

   JsTrace >> [error] Module 'TestModule' : testing: error message

All you need to do is use the included HtmlHelper extension method like this, depending on your syntax:

<%: Html.RenderJsTraceProxy() %>

or

@Html.RenderJsTraceProxy()

By default, the rendered script will proxy only messages that pass the “switch test”. If you pass “true” in the RenderJsTraceProxy(), it will send all of them, which might be a bit crazy in production.

The script uses the jQuery $.ajax() method to post a JSON object to the server asynchronously -- ignoring success or error as well.

I may have a follow up version that has more options for the Proxy, like being able to pass a predicate-style (returns boolean) method to determine whether or not to send the message to the server.  This way you could customize the logic yourself.

Check it out, and let me know what you think!

T