How prevent CSSTidy from removing the *property IE7 Hack? (Or another standalone tool)

Question

Bounty: Bounty given to whoever share a standalone command-line CSS minifier for Windows (that is, run just like JSMin and CSSTidy, but actually minifies rather than 'prettify' and remove properties

Using Visual Studio 2010 Post-Build Events, I'm currently working to reduce our CSS/JS framework by merging and minifying the files into .min for production when building the solution/project.

For the JS I'm using JSmin.exe while for CSS, CSSTidy.exe

All okay for JSmin, but CSSTidy is removing all IE7 *property hacks and other properties used by display-table.htc (-dt-display:). If I use the --preserve_css=true setting, it keeps the comments (which I don't want) and the *property have the * stripped out (which I want).

Example:

.row-fluid .span1 {width: 6.382978723%; *width: 6.329787233638298%;}

Becomes (note it added linebreak as well):

.row-fluid .span1 {
width:6.382979%;
width:6.329787%
}

The question made here is what I'm looking for BUT the answer was given for HTML Purifier (which I don't use) instead of a CSSTidy alternative.

So the questions:

• Is it possible to make CSSTidy NOT remove the IE7 hacks nor other invalid properties (which I actually use)?
• Is there any other standalone/command-line CSS compressor (specially one which actually minifies rather than just tidy it)? (bounty for that)

Obs.: The VS solution is TFS shared, can't make all devs install YUI or whatever other framework which isn't standalone, nor other languages frameworks like Ruby/PHP. Currently the jsmin.exe and csstidy.exe were the best since I just added both to the solution and call them on post-events.

Answer 1

After spending all Friday searching and not finding a good tool, today I gave a new shot and finally found a tool that minify both CSS and JS.

The name isn't much straightforward, that's why was hard to find: Microsoft Ajax Minifier

While asks for install, I just copied the folder contents to the project and worked like a charm.

---

For those who want to use it as Post-Event build:

Considering you have a .js folder and you want to concatenate and minify all .js files that end with .debug.js.

type "$(ProjectDir)\Scripts\*.debug.js" | "$(ProjectDir)tools\AjaxMin" -JS -comments:none –global:jQuery,$ -out "$(ProjectDir)\Scripts\myProject.min.js" -clobber

• $(ProjectDir) is the project folder;
• type is a cmd.exe command for displaying the contents of one or more files. So I order to get the contents of all *.debug.js files and leave in the STDIN;
• Invoke AjaxMin.exe (no need for the .exe that I copied to my \tools\ folder;
• pass arguments as needed with -argName:argValue;
• use -out and a pathname with a file that will be outputted;
• add -clobber to overwrite if file exists

Now everytime I need to update my css and js files, I re/build the project and voilá, minified CSS and JS.