Gulp Task Is Broken

For anyone watching in 2020 - the Gulp tasks don't work if you are using Node version 12 or higher.

I was ultimately able to resolve this after performing several actions.

1. Update the gulp to version 4
2. Edit the default task defition to use Gulp 4 syntax
3. To use with VS2019 - change the tools version

Updating Gulp

I updated to the latest version of each by editing my package.json to read like this:

  "devDependencies": {
    "gulp": "*",
    "gulp-msbuild": "*",
    "gulp-nuget-restore": "*"
  }

Then ran npm update --save-dev inside the project directory.

After that, my package.json looked like this:

  "devDependencies": {
    "gulp": "^4.0.2",
    "gulp-msbuild": "^0.8.0",
    "gulp-nuget-restore": "^0.7.0"
  }

YMMV - you could also potentially use these version numbers directly instead of the '*'

Updating the gulpfile

After doing that, the gulp task still wouldn't load. Turns out that gulp 4 changes the syntax.

This is the only portion that's affected:

gulp.task('default', ['nuget-restore'], function () {
  return gulp.src('../../project.msbuild')
    .pipe(msbuild({
      stdout: true,
      targets: ['Start'],
      toolsVersion: 15,
      verbosity: 'minimal'
    }));
});

Here's the same, with the newer syntax:

gulp.task('default', gulp.series('nuget-restore', function () {
  return gulp.src('../../project.msbuild')
    .pipe(msbuild({
      stdout: true,
      targets: ['Start'],
      toolsVersion: 15,
      verbosity: 'minimal'
    }));
}));

After making this change, finally my gulp tasks were loading in Visual Studio!

Updating for VS2019

Now I had a new error message - MSBuild wouldn't start.

It seems that is due to this gulp file specifically looking for MSBuild 15, however VS2019 ships with a newer version of MSBuild.

I simply changed the toolsVersion to 'auto' - hopefully this would work for future versions of VS as well.

gulp.task('default', gulp.series('nuget-restore', function () {
  return gulp.src('../../project.msbuild')
    .pipe(msbuild({
      stdout: true,
      targets: ['Start'],
      toolsVersion: 'auto',
      verbosity: 'minimal'
    }));
}));

Hopefully you see this if you're having the same issue! This was by far much more difficult than the actual assignment :)