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The ASP.NET SDK has an asset pipeline that processes all the web content for the app to apply optimizations (compression/fingerprinting, etc.).
There are a few things that make integration between the MSBuild SDK and the ASP.NET Core pipeline challenging, and while we've given people guidance, it would be great if we can enable this scenario to work without having to make such changes to their project.
There are two main challenges that we face:
- By default the TypeScript targets run too late in the pipeline for us to see the generated outputs. Our guidance suggests hooking up the relevant targets to the
PrepareForBuild
target as shown below:
<PrepareForBuildDependsOn>
CompileTypeScript;
CompileTypeScriptWithTSConfig;
GetTypeScriptOutputForPublishing;$(PrepareForBuildDependsOn)
</PrepareForBuildDependsOn>
- I suspect the snippet above is not fully correct, as more targets are involved in the TypeScript setup in
CompileDependsOn
. - This makes the TS targets run early enough so that standard targets in the ASP.NET Core pipeline can detect and process them as expected.
- The second challenge that we face is that is typical for people to dump their outputs into the wwwroot folder. When this happens, (after the change above)
GetTypeScriptOutputForPublishing
will add all theGeneratedJavaScript
items to theContent
item group unconditionally.- This results in the presence of duplicate
Content
items that interferes with the build. - We've given people the following target to remove the duplicates before the
GetTypeScriptOutputForPublishing
target adds them.
<Target Name="RemoveDuplicateTypeScriptOutputs" BeforeTargets="GetTypeScriptOutputForPublishing"> <ItemGroup> <Content Remove="@(GeneratedJavaScript)" /> </ItemGroup> </Target>
- This results in the presence of duplicate
This gets things into a working state, but it's obviously not trivial for customers to discover/setup in their app. Hopefully we can work together to make this scenario just work
by implementing a few simple changes.
- Have a target
ResolveTypeScriptOutputs
or similar that produces the compile outputs as items in theContent
item group and that can run early enough in the pipeline (PrepareForBuild is a good candidate, or it can be configurable). - Avoid adding duplicate content items to the
Content
item group by usingExclude="@(Content)
to prevent duplicates. - Checking for
UsingMicrosoftNETSdkStaticWebAssets
to wire upResolveTypeScriptOutputs
early enough in the pipeline so that the outputs can be detected and disable other targets that are not needed (Anything that deals with copying the outputs to the output/publish folder is already handled by the static web assets SDK).
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JeroMiya commentedon Dec 26, 2024
Just adding a related issue with the
PrepareForBuildDependsOn
element: this element is suggested in the documentation, but adding it causes thePreComputeCompileTypeScriptWithTSConfig
task to be skipped, because it can't findtsconfig.json
file in the content files list at that stage in the build perhaps? I've verified thetsconfig.json
file is marked asContent
(it's marked so by default), andPreComputeCompileTypeScriptWithTSConfig
task is NOT skipped when thePrepareForBuildDependsOn
element is removed. So, as far as I can tell, there is no way to useMicrosoft.TypeScript.MSBuild
with atsconfig.json
in the current implementation. Additionally, without adding thePrepareForBuildDependsOn
, in .net 9 SDK, it appears the fingerprinting build step errors out and fails (see; dotnet/aspnetcore#58948 which is closed yet is still an issue with no working workaround).So yeah, this is a critical issue. Hopefully it can get escalated, yeah? It's preventing developers from updating to the latest visual studio/.net sdk.
FreyLuis commentedon Dec 26, 2024
@JeroMiya This works on .net 8:
dotnet/aspnetcore#57662 (comment)
JeroMiya commentedon Dec 26, 2024
We experienced this issue while attempting to migrate to
Microsoft.TypeScript.MSBuild
from a customnpm
based task to do the frontend build, so the migration will be put on hold until there is an official fix.boppbo commentedon Apr 23, 2025
Adding these two workarounds is not enough for me as I get the following error in a blazor webassembly standalone app:
>Microsoft.NET.Sdk.StaticWebAssets.Compression.targets(263,5): Error : The asset '<removed>\obj\Debug\net9.0\compressed\zgut133n0y-5xksfm6j99.gz' can not be found at any of the searched locations 'wwwroot\js\base.js' and '<removed>\wwwroot\js\base.js'.
I fixed this error by setting
<DisableBuildCompression>true</DisableBuildCompression>
Edit: Sometimes my .js output files were deleted during rebuild.
1TT-Chris commentedon May 15, 2025
After much fiddling, in my .Net8 Blazor Web App project, I found I needed to add
FindConfigFiles
toPrepareForBuildDependsOn
to pick up tsconfig files. And theRemoveDuplicateTypeScriptOutputs
needed to useAfterTargets
rather thanBeforeTargets
.glatzert commentedon Jun 4, 2025
We just stumbled over this problem in a Razor Class Library and it's rather annoying, that TS isn't a first class citizen there - could you guys talk to the dotnet guys and figure out, how to properly include TS in RCL and other dotnet things like Blazor?