What it does

CacheTag helps speed up your page load times in a number of ways.

• Reduces the number of HTTP requests by combining resources
• Makes resources quicker to download thanks to minification
• All resources are hashed, preventing clients from using old resources
• Since any change creates a new hash, resources can be cached aggressively

Compared to the competition

CacheTag provides a number of benefits compared to other similar frameworks.

• It's real easy to use, see the examples
• It's flexible because it works with generic lists, no custom bundle classes
• It's faster because it only compiles resources when needed, even in debug mode
• Built to be extendable, use the source Luke!

Example Razor code

Let's say you want to include a couple of CSS files and JavaScripts, you can try this..

@Html.RenderStyles(new []
{
	"~/CSS/Reset.css",
	"~/CSS/Site.less"
})
@Html.RenderScripts(new []
{
	"~/Scripts/jquery-1.7.1.js",
	"~/Scripts/app.coffee"
})

.. and that's it. Check out what this would produce below.

Resulting HTML in release mode

The example above would minify and combine the resources, calculate a unique hash and output HTML similar to this.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/_cachetag/e4dddf2cdd91d693e023cdc5dc0b56d8664766db.css" />
<script src="/_cachetag/80e9e6fc43c6644ea9badec99eb5c6cbec87c4b0.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Resulting HTML in debug mode

In debug mode however, it would still calculate hashes of all resources but link to them individually, each with a query parameter containing the hash, this is to ease debugging but still prevent you from accidentally using stale scripts or CSS.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/CSS/Reset.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/CSS/Site.less" />
<script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.1.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/Scripts/app.coffee" type="text/javascript"></script>