Cassette bundles vs MVC4 bundles

Question

I am currently working on a prototype ASP.NET MVC 3 solution that will be used as a base for several project rewrites (from web forms).

One of the goals that I have is t

Answer 1

I ended up using Cassette on my last project and it's working pretty well. There's really not a whole lot of configuration to it if you use NuGet, so my thinking is that it wouldn't be too hard to use Cassette now and then switch later if you wanted to.

One other thing to consider is that Cassette does Less compiling. I'm not sure if the MVC4 bundling does that or not since I haven't had time to read up on it.

Answer 2

Cassette is still an interesting alternative as it has native support for less and coffescript. It has also support for HTML Templates, if you are interested in client side mvc frameworks (backbone, knockout etc)

Answer 3

Information about ASP.NET MVC bundling is here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2011/11/27/new-bundling-and-minification-support-asp-net-4-5-series.aspx.

ASP.NET is adding a feature that makes it easy to “bundle” or “combine” multiple CSS and JavaScript files into fewer HTTP requests. This causes the browser to request a lot fewer files and in turn reduces the time it takes to fetch them.

The next release of ASP.NET is also adding a new feature that makes it easy to reduce or “minify” the download size of the content as well.

Looks like it's essentially the same thing as Cassette. All other things being equal, use the solution that is native to ASP.NET MVC.

Answer 4

Just as an update to this, LESS and CoffeeScript support was added in the Update 2 package for Visual Studio 2012, so it's starting to look more and more like it would be better to add what transformations you need to the native implementation of the Bundling/Minification backed into MVC4 than go with Cassette in the long term.