.NET (Visual Studio) Share assets between projects

Question

I\'m working with Visual Studio. There I have a solution with several web-projects (.net MVC 4). All of these web-projects use the same javascript-libs. Currently I copied the l

Answer 1

Slightly older thread, but I have another way of doing a similar thing using Web Essentials, that handles the issue of not publishing correctly.

I have a shared folder outside of the projects that require the shared file, normally a 'common' project with other things in as well, but can be just a simple folder as suggested by Michael Perrenoud.

However instead of 'Add as Link' I have been creating a new bundle in the project that requires the shared js/css file, with the same name as the shared file, and then referencing that file in the shared folder using a relative reference location rather than the root based one it starts with.

To add a file from a shared folder in the root of the solution to the scripts folder use the following code in a new bundle file (*.bundle), changing the folder/file names as required.

        
                false
                true
        
        
                ../../MySharedFolder/my-js-file.js
        

Then every time you build it recreates the bundle with the latest version, this version is then also published as expected :)

You can even create a minified version if desired by changing 'minify' to true. Or better yet you can add them loads as a bundle too if you want, you have that flexibilty.