Suggestion: Mash & minify ability like Chirpy.

There is an addin for VS2010 called Chirpy (chirpy.codeplex.com), it can manage, combine and minify css, dotless, coffeescript, and javascript files which the Workbench lacks of.

If the Workbench could provide these functions, it will be more competitive.

Minification and some perf inprovements would be a plus

Yes to minification!

You already have minification, you just don't realize it b/c Mindscape didn't provide an easy option to set it.  Here's what you do:

1.)  Open the Sass.zip file in the Mindscape Web Workbench entension

C:\Users\***YOUR_USER_NAME***\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions\Mindscape\Mindscape Web Workbench\1.0.252.18324\CustomTool\Sass.zip

2.)  Edit this file inside Sass.zip:  Sass.zip\Sass\lib\sass\environment.rb

3.)  At the end of the "def initialize(parent = nil)" method (line 31 in my version of environment.rb) right before the "end" statement, add the following line:  "self.options[:style] = :compact".  Save the Sass.zip file with your modified environment.rb.

4.)  Restart Visual Studio and when you change your .SCSS files, the result is minified .CSS.  There's probably something similar for .less and coffeescript, but I don't use them so I don't know the specifics.

+1 for making this easily configurable in some future version of Web Workbench, but why wait for someone to get around to fixing what you can do yourself?

 It's good to know that this is possible for Sass, but it is not possible to do this for coffeescript, as far as I checked, there are no configuration files for cs, or am I missing something?

We've actually provided a way to specify Sass compiler options such as :style => :compact without having to hack around inside the internals.  It's a bit of a kludge until we find a better way, but here it is:

http://www.mindscapehq.com/forums/Thread.aspx?ThreadID=4460

We're still looking at how we can offer a similar feature for CoffeeScript.

It appears that this option has been removed in the latest free version of the web workbench (2.0.501.19486), so my method is now the only option other than purchasing the pro edition of the product. Not that the product isn't worth buying, but the SASS part is open source (MIT license).

SASS might be MIT, but i doubt intellisense & syntax highlighting is :)

I hope Mindscape will focus on those 2, as i don't really care about minification since there are tons of tools out there that already handle that part correctly like microsoft ajax minifier, yui compressor, uglify, not to mention squishit, chirpy, etc, and the upcoming js/css bundling/minification support which will ship with .net 4.5, and is as of now available on nuget (which will probably make all the above obsolete if it works correctly)

What i am willing to pay for (and did) is the ability to have kickass intellisense support, and eventually support for compilation towards css (but again ..there are tools out there that do that just fine like dotless) for something i would love to adopt, but have skipped so far because of lack of tooling support for .LESS in Resharper and/or VS2010.

If i where Mindscape, i would sell the intellisense part, and give the rest away for free, not the other way around.

PS. You can sell most opensource licenses ..well gpl, excluded :)

MIT: including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software

Hi,

Thanks for the interest in the direction we're taking this :-)

We don't actually charge for SASS compilation or highlighting. That is free - always has been, always will be. We appreciate that we're building on the shoulders of giants but we also think we're contributing a lot of value to getting SASS, LESS and CoffeeScript adopted by .NET developers who don't want to fumble around with Ruby to make it work, or lose intellisense which they have become accustomed to.

Many of the users pay for the product for the other features that get added in the paid version (minification, document formatting, comment/uncomment functions, etc) and the knowledge that they're supporting ongoing development of the product.

Intellisense and syntax highlighting will always be a key differentiator of the product - even the free one, and we will will be continuing improvements in that area and adding other features along the way also.

Thanks for your feedback guys,

John-Daniel Trask
Co-founder
Mindscape

Well thanks again for the nice product, i have been waiting for .LESS intellisence since at least 2 years now ..maybe 2012 will be the year i migrate our site to .LESS thanks to WW :)

- Robert

Hello Matt,

The scss-compiler-options directive hasn't been removed -- if it's not working, then that's a bug and we apologise for it, but it is certainly working in our test environment. If it's not working for you, could you post a repro please? Thanks!

My mistake - the minifier does work. I started my scss file with a comment and didn't have the "//* scss-compile-options: :style => :compact" on the very first line. Once it was the very first thing, the minifier worked again. Sorry for the mistake.

Hi JD,

Do you have any thoughts as to when simple join functionality may be available. I am looking to be able to split coffee files, because they are starting to get big.

I tried Chirpy but it won't join coffee files, and it's trying to do too much stuff that I would prefer to keep Web Workbench doing.

So given script1.coffee, script2.coffee, other.coffee

Output: combined.coffee > combined.js, combined.min.js

Many Thanks, Scott

Hi Scott,

Short answer: soon

Long answer: We've just about completed our re-architecture of the product and it will have feature parity with what we have today. Once that's stable we'll be adding features like what you're asking for here. It helps that we internally have a project that uses several coffee files and it's a pain to have to do the combining outside of the WW so it will certainly be an early feature addition following the rework.

I hope that helps,

John-Daniel

I'm keen for support for normal JS / CSS files too. I primarily write LESS/CoffeeScript at home, but would like to try getting Web Workbench at work for the support of automatically minifying the files on save.

Work wont use LESS/CoffeeScript.

Thanks JD, look forward to it.

Cheers, Scott