One of the main guidelines at Stack Exchange is that we are open by default. So, I'm excited to announce that we're open-sourcing StackExchange.Precompilation, a tool to help you bring faster pre-compile times and Roslyn (DNX inspired) goodies to your old ASP.NET MVC 5 project. What does it do, you ask? It replaces the C# compiler with a custom executable (which uses Roslyn), that compiles both your C# source files (.cs) as well as Razor view files (.cshtml) into a single assembly, while allowing you to plug into the compilation (inspired by the DNX metaprogramming capabilities). Someone might consider this crazy, but let me give you an idea of why it was the only way to go for us. As we started adding translations to our Q&A engine (Portuguese, Japanese, Russian), we noticed dramatic increases in build times. Staging build times sky-rocketed from under 2-minutes to 5+ minutes, which resulted in a lot of spare time and distraction opportunities for team members waiting on a pending deploy to meta, and later production (those deployment build times increased accordingly as well). We tracked down the increased build times to aspnet_compiler.exe, specifically to how it compiles Razor views. Although the compilation (C# -> IL) is parallel, the generation of C# from Razor views (.cshtml -> C#) is serial. We do a lot of meta-programming to bake translations into our views at (pre-)compile-time (as opposed to doing a lookup for each string at run-time). The only way to make this process fast is by making it parallel, which is unfortunately impossible with ASP.NET MVC 5 tooling. A solution for the problem was created in our localization project. What happened next is I switched from the Core Q&A team to the Careers team (yes, team switching is a thing at Stack Exchange) for a while, to reconcile different localization tools used by both teams. StackExchange.Precompilation is the result of packaging Core's "make-pre-compilation-fast-and-pluggable" code into a package that we, and now you, can re-use between teams. Here's a nice chart to illustrate what has happened to build times in the past year thanks to optimizing pre-compilation (spoiler: they're back to around 2 minutes):
Another nice side effect is that our MVC 5 views can now contain C# 6 code in Razor code blocks. And it gets even better! In case you don't need (or want) to pre-compile in each build, the package provides a Roslyn-backed ViewEngine, which gives you the same C# 6 support, at run-time. A future prospect is migrating to ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6, where DNX and the MVC 6 Razor implementation can actually do parallel pre-compilation and meta-programming. When that happens, migrating our localization meta-programming code won't be difficult as the interfaces are nearly identical. Start using the package today by running Install-Package StackExchange.Precompilation.Build in your package manager console. Additional instructions and technical details are available on GitHub and NuGet. If you're looking to do C# projects full-time, check out our C# developer job postings.