Too often in my web development past I have found myself wading through huge clumsy CSS files of several hundred lines or more, searching for that place where a particular class is defined or to try and identify what it is that is overriding something else. It can be quite a nightmare. However I recently came across .Less (pronounced "dot-less"), a port of the great Ruby Less library for .NET. This is a brilliantly simple-to-use solution to an often-painful situation.

Not long ago Jeremy Skinner created Phantom, a build system for .NET based on the Boo language. Since its creation, I have been following it with interest (and have forked it).

Up until recently despite my interest, I had not had the opportunity or reason to make any modifications to it. However, I have not long started developing a new site and I thought this was the perfect time to make use of it - it is clear that the clean Python-like Boo syntax is far more preferable than XML-based build files. However, it was missing a couple of features I wanted, so I have added them. I thought I'd briefly document them in this post for whoever might find it of interest.