Fast forward to last week: we again split the front-end application out into a separate, C# project. We did this for several reasons:

• We ran into trouble trying to remote debug the F# web project
• The project had grown to the point that it was quite large, and it made sense to separate the two for maintenance
• It’s common even in other languages to separate the front-end into a separate folder or project as different teams are often responsible for the different apps, which is not quite our case but close
• We wanted to clean up our Angular code so that we had less Angular spread throughout and more standard JavaScript; for this we wanted to use bundling again

I was able to add Web Essentials back into the solution since we were again using a C# project. However, this had its own challenges, specifically in the form of communication to the rest of the team that they would need to install Web Essentials in order for their updates to take effect.

Fortunately, my colleague Anton Tayanovskyy recently found and pointed me toward the WebEssentialsBundleTask, which is a MSBuild task that will run the Web Essentials transformations at runtime depending on the build configuration, i.e. Debug or Release. This tool provides explicit script references for Debug builds and a bundled (and minified, if desired) version for Release builds. It seems to only require the presence of a Web Essentials-style .bundle file to work, so I would expect this to work equally well with a F#-only solution, though I have yet to try that. The WebEssentialsBundleTask has its own issues, though. It will modify your index.html file whenever it runs, so you must make sure to revert changes you don’t want to keep. We rarely change our index.html file since nearly everything is built in the form of Angular directives or templates. Nevertheless, you should consider the cost to your own project.

You may wonder why we didn’t just build a simple FAKE task. After all, whitespace in JavaScript is relatively meaningless, so a very simple concat + remove could probably get the job done, especially since we use ; where applicable. I definitely considered this option, as well as creating new FAKE tasks built around a node.exe using tools like grunt.js or gulp.js. In the end, these all seemed like overkill with the availability of Web Essentials, at least until we had evaluated whether WE would work for our purposes. We are still evaluating. What are you using? Did you find this helpful?