Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

Question

I want an msbuild task to compile the views so I can see if there are compile time errors at well... compile time. Any ideas?

Answer 1

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

1. Open the project file in a text editor.
2. Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
3. At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

Answer 2

I frankly would recommend the RazorGenerator nuget package. That way your views have a .designer.cs file generated when you save them and on top of getting compile time errors for you views, they are also precompiled into the assembly (= faster warmup) and Resharper provides some additional help as well.

To use this include the RazorGenerator nuget package in you ASP.NET MVC project and install the "Razor Generator" extension under item under Tools → Extensions and Updates.

We use this and the overhead per compile with this approach is much less. On top of this I would probably recommend .NET Demon by RedGate which further reduces compile time impact substantially.

Hope this helps.