Using Precompilation as part of our build process.
This is an extention to my automated builds blog post earlier. I think it's a good idea to precompile the "product" releases since not every end user actually cares to mess with the rainbow code. Most people that want to put up a website don't care how it works, just that it works.
A precompile task in our release process would streamline our process.
There is a command line tool in addition to the URL based precompile in asp.net 2.0 ( http://localhost/appname/precompile.axd).
aspnet_compiler.exe
[-m metabasePath | -v virtualPath | [-p physicalDir]]
[targetDir]
If the target directory isn't given, the application is pre-compiled in place and the source is left
in the same area. If the target directory is given, all source files are compiled into assemblies after having content stripped from them. Empty source files remain for the webserver to know that they exist on the filesystem.
I think this is a good process for a nightly or weekly build process on DEVINT ( to start )
1. Download latest code from DEVINT via SVN to a "targetCompileDirectory"
2. Execute aspnet_compiler with the [physicalDir] = "targetCompileDirectory" and [targetDir] = "targetPackageDirectory"
3. Zip/Rar "targetPackageDirectory" with a datestamp Ready for testing.
The Precompilation API also can be called from .NET programmatically. This I'll write about another time, when our framework is a little cooler.