This document discusses tools for frontend development like NPM, Bower, Gulp and Grunt that are supported in Visual Studio 2015. It explains that NPM is a package manager for Node.js, Bower manages client-side packages, and Gulp and Grunt are automated task runners for tasks like building, linting, minifying. It also lists some common Gulp plugins and shows how to integrate Gulp tasks into Visual Studio using the Task Runner Explorer.

1. NPM, Bower and Gulp Kickstart
in Visual Studio 2015
Ivan Varga

2. Visual Studio 2015
Built in support for tools like Grunt, Bower, Gulp and NPM

3. NPM
Package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js.
package.json
Node packages: bower, gulp, grunt

4. Bower
Bower is a package management system for client-side
programming. It depends on Node.js and npm. It works with git and
GitHub repositories.
.bower.json
.bowerrc

5. Gulp vs Grunt
Node based automated task runners
compiling sass, linting css, concatenating files, minifying files,
auto-generating image sprites and compressing images
Grunt config file vs Gulp code

6. Gulp tasks
gulpfile.js
“gulp-load-plugins“, “gulp-bower“, “gulp-config“, “gulp-concat”,
“gulp-uglify“, “gulp-filter“, “gulp-util“, “gulp-useref”, “gulp-minify-css”,
“main-bower-files”, “gulp-angular-templatecache”

7. Task runner explorer
Execute Grunt/Gulp tasks
Bind Grunt/Gulp task to a Visual Studio event(Build and Solution
Open).

8. Demo
https://github.com/ivanvarga/Gulp-tasks