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Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Refresh CSS without refreshing your page

I've been using Visual Studio 2013 for several months now and one of the new features I was enjoying was Browser Link. Since I have been implementing the front end for a project, I have been using Web Essentials for VS 2013 with all the CSS built using LESS. While I have used more complex and advanced LESS compilers, it's got a nice integration into Visual Studio with pretty solid support, and the developer has been keeping it well updated. It's nice because I can play in my browser, move my changes into my "main.less" file right in VS, fire off a Shift+Alt+Y shortcut combo, and my LESS files are compiled into my "main.css" file. With Browser Link, the page detects the change and refreshes with the CSS updates. Voila!

Now, anyone who read that with a keen eye would have noticed the use of the word "was" in the opening sentence. A past progressive verb! This means I am not "enjoying" the feature anymore.