Cshtml files are compiled by Razor into C# files. To track down some errors (or just to understand Razor) it might be useful to examine the C# code generated.
For testing I created a small Razor view in an MVC4 project.
@{string someString ="somestring";var someBool =false;//-}<h1>Header</h1>
Some other text and @someString.
@if(someBool){<p>Yeps!</p>}else{<p>Nope!</p>}
@{
string someString = "somestring";
var someBool = false;
//-
}
<h1>Header</h1>
Some other text and @someString.
@if(someBool)
{
<p>Yeps!</p>
}
else
{
<p>Nope!</p>
}
The easiest way to view the generated C# code is by introducing a compile error to bring up the compilation error page. I uncommented the – on line 4 (which obviously is incorrect C# code). In the bottom of the error page, there is a link to display the compilation source.
With DevOps bringing source control to configuration files and publishing to production servers being automated – bringing both code and configuration over on the same time, the difference between code and config has become less than ever (if it even exists).
A few weeks ago I reread Mike Hadlow’s brilliant post The Configuration Complexity Clock. As I’m also in the middle of setting up publishing routines for a web application I started to think about the difference between configuration and code. The more I think about it, the less clear the difference is.
A simple attempt to differentiate them would be to look at where they are stored.
Everything in source files that are consumed by the compiler is code.
Everything in configuration files that are read at runtime is configuration.
Unfortunately that is not the entire truth. For example the route config in an ASP.NET MVC application is a kind of configuration – but it is done in code. The same is true for the Entity Framework Code First mappings – it is done in code (either through attributes or a fluent API), but is a kind of mapping configuration. An example of the other way around is startup configuration scripts (think of *nix .bashrc or the old autoexec.bat on DOS systems). It is configuration, but is run as a script.
There are definitely cases where it is not that simple to define what is configuration and what is code.
