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The ASP.NET (web forms) project template in Visual Studio 2013 includes several packages. I'm trying to figure out which ones are essential (may need to create a separate question for this). The post at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2013/10/16/asp-net-features-in-new-project-templates-in-visual-studio-2013.aspx explains the purpose of some of them, but I cannot figure out which need Antlr serves. Can someone clarify?

abatishchev
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Alek Davis
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2 Answers2

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It is a transitive dependency declared in the WebGrease package, where it is used for a CSS lexer and parser.

Sam Harwell
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Also relevant for Visual Studio 2015 (ASP.NET MVC 5)

Bundling and minification in the ASP.Net templates is implemented in Microsoft.AspNet.Web.Optimization, which depends upon WebGrease, which itself depends upon Antlr.

So if you want to take advantage of ASP.Net template's built-in bundling and minification, you need them all.

Nick
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    It seems odd to expose an inner-dependency like this. I don't like it when my project references snowball because one dependency needs 20 others that I don't personally need. – Dai Aug 08 '16 at 11:12
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    @Dai Why is that odd? This is how libraries should work, by doing one thing well. If they need extra functionality, then they can rely on other existing libraries. Do you expect them to implement an entire lexical parser in the optimization library? – Mani Gandham Aug 24 '16 at 03:16
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    @ManiGandham that's fine - but I'd prefer it if VS would only show *direct dependencies* of my project in the Project References list and hide descendant dependencies by default. – Dai Aug 24 '16 at 03:18
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    @Dai - that's actually precisely how VS 2017 works. If you expand the top level dependencies, you see the sub-dependencies, but they aren't shown by default. – Erik Funkenbusch May 14 '17 at 22:48
  • "That's actually precisely how VS 2017 works". Well yes, but only with the SDK-style csproj file format. – Stephen Kennedy Nov 05 '18 at 00:04