For those that do not know, Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 release schedules have changed dramatically. Instead of major updates strategically planned throughout the year, it seems that developers now can enjoy updates in a more streamlined manner and on a more frequent basis. As of this writing, the Antares development team experiences an update as often as once a week. Historically, this would mean half a day or more of down time, but now it is handled within 20 minutes or so. Impressive for sure…
problem: IDE unresponsive with .NETCORE web app and javascript
fix: quick update to your project .csproj file to correct GLOB pattern issue with MSBuild
Now accepting updates on a routine basis, things seemed fresh within the IDE and the team at Antares regularly discussed tips during our internal developer meetings as we experience the new features found within the updates. For the most part of 2017, meeting notes were positive until just recent when I discovered that the upgrade from 15.2.x to 15.3.x brought my development environment to an unusable state.
The above snippet can be run from any prepared environment, cross platform, and is seriously cool considering how times have changed as an Microsoft developer. The simple one line command will initialize an Antares.Web empty web application using the .NETCORE framework and is ready to run. Naturally, the developer has a choice to make based on tasks at hand but creating a rich user experience with javascript is a popular decision. Currently at Antares Technology Solutions, we enjoy leveraging Sencha ExtJS javascript (JS) framework toolkits to create Enterprise class solutions for our clients. Regardless of your JS framework choice, as soon as you introduce the libraries, custom scripts, and resources, the Visual Studio IDE becomes unresponsive.
Struggling for a few weeks now, the A-Team has combed through MSDN blogs and the community to learn from others on what the immediate work-around is for this particular situation. Sadly, since this is a new release as of August 2017, details are non-existent. Posting comments to a feed was our next step to help others come up with strategies on how to overcome this definite issue and halt in productivity.
Monday 9/18/207; the A-Team received an update from Microsoft related to the reported findings and based on the feedback we presented to Microsoft. [MSFT] changed the status of our problem to closed because we were able to demonstrate the issue and based on review Microsoft teams learned that the underlying issue was not the Visual Studio IDE but another product MSBuild.
A workaround was provided by the MSBuild team and is definately a simple thing to implement until a more official fix is released. Simply open your .csproj file for the .NETCORE web application and include the snippet below.
App_Sencha/**; simply instructs MSBuild to ignore all files within the App_Sencha folder and sub-folders. Replace this with your framework of choice and path for your content as necessary. You can then add glob patterns via ItemGroup sections within your .csproj file to include necessary files.