Microsoft Ajax Minifier

Scott Guthrie recently announced that the ASP.net team published a free tool that enables you to improve the performance of your Ajax applications by reducing the size of its JavaScript files. The new tool is named the Microsoft Ajax Minifier.

You can read Scott Guthrie’s announcement here.

Overview of the Microsoft Ajax Minifier

The Microsoft Ajax Minifier was created by Ron Logan (who is clearly a super-genius). The Microsoft Ajax team has been using this tool internally for a number of years. For example, they use the Microsoft Ajax Minifier to minify the Microsoft Ajax Library before publishing it.
The Microsoft Ajax Minifier enables you to reduce the size of a JavaScript file by removing unnecessary content from the JavaScript file. The tool supports two modes: normal crunching and hypercrunching.
When you use normal crunching, the Microsoft Ajax Minifier strips all comments, unnecessary whitespace, curly-braces, and semicolons from a JavaScript file. Surprisingly, just removing all of this unnecessary code fluff can make a significant difference to the size of a JavaScript file.
When you use hypercrunching, the Microsoft Ajax Minifer gets more aggressive about reducing the size of a JavaScript file. In hpercrunching mode, the Microsoft Ajax Minifier shortens the names of local variables (variables in functions but not global variables) and it removes unreachable code.
Read the entire article...