During the past month I decided to dive deep into learning ASP.NET 5, and what better way to learn than to start a new OSS project :)

I chose to make a new new simple and extensible Javascript/CSS runtime pre-processor for ASP.NET 5. It does file minification, combination and compression, has a nice file caching layer and it’s all done in async operations. I ported over a few ideas and code snippets from CDF (client dependency framework) but with a more modern approach. I’ve called it ‘Smidge’ = something really small.

The project is on GitHub, it’s still a work in progress but its functional and there’s even some documentation! In the next few weeks I’ll get more of the code and docs updated and hopefully have a beta release out. In the meantime, you can clone the source, browse the code, build it and of course use it if you like.

Project details

It’s currently only targeting aspnet50 and not the Core CLR… I didn’t start with Core CLR because there was some legacy code I had to port over and I wanted to get something up and working relatively quickly. It shouldn’t be too much work to convert to Core CLR and Mono, hopefully I’ll find time to do that soon. It’s referencing all of the beta-* libraries from the ASP.NET 5 nightly myget feeds since there’s some code I’m using that isn’t available in the current beta1 release (like Microsoft.AspNet.WebUtilities.UriHelper). The target KRE version is currently KRE-CLR-amd64 1.0.0-beta2-10760.

Installation

I’ve put up an Alpha 1 release on Nuget, so you can install it from there:

There’s some installation instructions here, you’ll need to add the smidge.json file yourself for now, can’t figure out how to get VS 2015 (kpm pack) to package that up … more learning required!

There’s certainly a lot of detective work involved in learning ASP.NET 5 but with the code being open source and browse-able/searchable on GitHub, it makes finding what you need fairly easy.