.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

This is an older thread but due to complex business requirements these days applications are divided in to different modules or sub projects.Thus, brings us the need to share common resources like JavaScript files, themes and CSS style sheet files.

I personally feel that common files should be put in separate Asp .Net MVC 5 project which has following structure :ASP.NET MVC5 folder structure

Now the best part is you can separately manage the dependencies using Bower,NPM or Nuget package manager.

After you have organised all the files in this project host this project to your own CDN or may be on cloud. You can use Using CDN in Bundle Approach to get script or link references.

That will help you sharing common resources across all the projects.There us a short coming though if you have many developers on the team and if someone added incompatible version lib can affect all the apps.

Answer 2

When you run every new ASP.NET MVC 4 project it's take a new port then other app have take.

I simply suggest you a simple thing.

run a project which contain all the pacakages. open them webmatrix and run them as localhost:80.

You need to set the port in settings section of your site in webmatrix. Now it will rechable at localhost now you can reference all the libraries from this packages.

Answer 3

Anyone that stumbles across this question here in the future should know that there are now Shared Projects in Visual Studio to solve this problem. Universal Windows projects use them by default and you can create your own by downloading and installing the VS extension here: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/315c13a7-2787-4f57-bdf7-adae6ed54450

Note: At this time they can be picky about what type of project you try to add the shared reference. I created a JavaScript shared project to share js files between a Windows store js app and an MVC web app and it would not let me do that saying they had to be of the same language. (It supports C#, C++, or JavaScript).

Answer 4

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.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<bundle xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://vswebessentials.com/schemas/v1/bundle.xsd">
        <settings>
                <minify>false</minify>
                <runOnBuild>true</runOnBuild>
        </settings>
        <files>
                <file>../../MySharedFolder/my-js-file.js</file>
        </files>
</bundle>

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.

Answer 5

Place the JS files in a single folder, likely above all others, and add them to the project but use the "Link" option. It's part of the drop down on the "OK" button in the "Add existing item..." dialog.