CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cssasp.netiisvisual-studio-2013
Micteu
Micteu

Reputation: 461

CSS changes automatically applied on local IIS pages

I'm hosting an ASP.NET website on Local IIS (not IIS Express), and as soon as I save a change to a .css file in Visual Studio, the change immediately appears in browser windows that use that file (or after mousing over the window in Chrome), without clearing caches and refreshing.

Why do the changes appear immediately?

Opening the .css file itself (not a page using the file) in the browser shows a more expected result: saving the file in Visual Studio does not change what I see in the browser until I refresh the .css file.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2633

Answers (2)

Micteu
Micteu

Reputation: 461

As it turns out, I had Browser Link enabled in Visual Studio, and with it, CSS Auto-Sync. This opens up a port on the local machine and uses SignalR to communicate with the browser window about 400 times per second, including any CSS changes needed.

For more information, see these topics:

Upvotes: 1

Banana
Banana

Reputation: 7463

This probably happens due to caching. when you open the css itself, it retrieves a new copy from the server, but when you open a page that uses the css file, the css file is being cached as the page's resource and the browser just shows the cached resources until you force it to reload them.

a trick i learned to fix the issue, is to link the css file to the aspx page and include a random query string to the linking, that way it tricks the browser to think that its a new resource and reload it from the server anyway.

like this:

<link href="../stylesheets/MyCSS.css?<%=DateTime.Now%>" 
      rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

we use the aspx preprocessor directive <%=DateTime.Now%> to append the current time as a query string, to ensure the link is always different.

  • Dont forget the question mark between the css filename and the preprocessor directive

Upvotes: 0

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