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Baler v0.3 Released

I've just pushed a new version of Baler. It's current version of 0.3 but semantically speaking it should be v0.2.2 as I haven't changed the API. But hey we all make mistakes :(

What's New?

Thanks to a suggestion from edazdarevic this release reworks the way files are generated.

Originally if a bale wasn't flagged as generated (e.g. after an IIS reset) a new file with a random name would be generated. This mean't that during development a shed load of files would be generated as you changed some other file and restarted your server. This lead to an awful mess in your output folder. Now what happens if a bale isn't flagged as generated the contents of the file are processed and a hash is generated from this. This hash is then used as the filename for that file (appended with the correct extension). If that file exists then the contents haven't changed and are not written out to a new file saving that extra file system write.

In the future I'd like to adopt the approach of simply writing out references to the bales contents during DEBUG/development mode and only process the bales when in PRODUCTION mode. But for now I think this is a reasonable stop gap.

edazdarevic has some more ideas that I plan on trying to integrate but I need more time to think about how to approach it without bloating the code.

Published in .NET on June 16, 2011