How to prevent visual studio 2017 from build javascript?

Question

I upgraded today to VS2017, and I saw that every time I change something in my my web app project - the build build all my javascript again (I'm using webpack for client). It is cool, but it take a lot of time, so I'll be happy to configure it to stop building the javascript (and I'll build it myself just when it changed).

Answer 1

Simple Answer

In your csproj file, add the following line to the existing PropertyGroup block:

<PropertyGroup>
     <TypeScriptCompileBlocked>true</TypeScriptCompileBlocked>
</PropertyGroup>

If adding .ts or .tsx files to your project causes your project file to be modified, you may need to apply the following fix. See the bug report for more details.

 <ItemGroup>
      <None Remove="**/*.ts;**/*.tsx" />
      <Content Remove="**/*.ts;**/*.tsx" />
      <TypeScriptCompile Include="**/*.ts;**/*.tsx" />
 </ItemGroup>

Add a tsconfig.json file to your project root and make sure the following setting is set:

"compileOnSave": false,

Finally, Restart Visual Studio

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Details

Nuget creates a generated targets file called [ProjectName].csproj.nuget.g.targets in the obj directory of your project. This targets file is importing Microsoft.NET.Sdk.Web.ProjectSystem.targets which in turn imports Microsoft.TypeScript.targets.

In the Microsoft.TypeScript.targets file, the following line has a comment that lets us know that if this property is set to true, then the TypeScript compilation task will do nothing:

<!-- Makes the TypeScript compilation task a no-op -->
<TypeScriptCompileBlocked Condition="'$(TypeScriptCompileBlocked)' == ''">false</TypeScriptCompileBlocked>

Answer 2

I'm using webpack's ts-loader to compile and bundle my TypeScript files. So I no longer needed the automatic compilation that Visual Studio performed on each build. In Visual Studio 2017, I just commented out the following line from tsconfig.json to stop the automatic compilation:

"outDir": "./wwwroot/build/",