Sharing assets (images/css/js) between projects us

Question

Is there an effective way to share visual assets between different projects?

This would include images, CSS and JavaScript.

I've looked at the following Stack Overflow questions which don't seem to answer this:

• Sharing css/javascript/images between different projects in Visual Studio
• Visual Studio - Resource (CSS/JS/Images) sharing between web projects
• Handling common JavaScript files in Visual Studio 2010

We make use of TFS, not sure if that might have something we can use?

Answer 1

There's nothing built-in ASP.NET MVC that will allow you to generate links to other ASP.NET applications. All the helpers work with relative controller actions for the current application. If all your static files are located inside another ASP.NET application (a sort of custom CDN) then you could define the base location of this application in your web.config and then build custom helpers that will serve those resources:

@Html.Resource("/foo.js", "text/javascript")

and the custom helper will generate an absolute url to this external resource.

Answer 2

A handy solution is to create a "Solution folder" as shown in Erik Philips's solution.

Basically "Solution folder" is just a common share folder created in your solution that contains all shared files, then you refer these files in your project(s) as links. For all practical purposes these share files could be used in your site(s) as if they were present in your local site folder.

Answer 3

I have been struggling with this same problem, and I found that the best solution for me was simply to create a "holder" project for the assets files, and with the help of pre-build events just copy all the files into the projects that require them. This way you just need to edit them in the "holder" project, but they will always be in-sync as long as you dont touch them in the other projects.