Based on your comments, we need to discuss how the Bundling mechanism works in MVC.
Change Based on the VSDev comment below, you need WebGrease installed in your project. NuGet would be easiest to install this package.
When you set up the beam configuration (example not top to illustrate)
bundles.Add(new ScriptBundle("~/bundles/mainJs") .Include("~/Scripts/mainSite.js") .Include("~/Scripts/helperStuff.js");
Then in your views, you call something like @Scripts.Render("~/bundles/mainJs") . When your web.config is set to debug compilation OR , you explicitly disable binding using the following line in the BundleConfig.cs file
BundleTable.EnableOptimizations = false;
Then, in your opinion, you will see the following displayed
<script src="/Scripts/mainSite.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="/Scripts/helperStuff.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
These are the individual elements that made up our package, uncompressed and listed separately. The reason they are listed separately in debug mode is because you can debug your scripts and view them as you write them (names of actual variables, etc.).
Now that we are not in debug compilation and have not disabled the EnableOptimizations function, MVC will combine these files in our packages, compress (reduce) them and output only one script tag.
<script src="/bundles/mainJs?v=someBigLongNumber" type="text/javascript"></script>
Note that the source matches the package name from the bundle configurations. In addition, the number after ?v= will change when the file in this package changes. This will help prevent caching of old js and css files by client browsers.
Your scripts still exist and are output, but they are compressed and combined into a single file called /bundles/mainJs . This feature is present.
A) compress files and reduce transmitted information and
B) reduce the number of calls to the website to get the necessary content to display the page.
Nothing is missing, it seems that everything is working as intended. At the production site, minimization makes these files almost impossible to read, so why minimization does not affect debugging.
Regarding the fact that the jQuery user interface is still the only JS file, make sure that someone hasn't made it hard code in your layout view. As for JS errors, these may be errors that are present in your development window or maybe something did not compress correctly (however, in all of my MVC development I did not see a JS error due to a poor rating).