I use a lot grunt and gulp when working so, to improve my workflow with Visual Studio, I created the GruntLauncher extension which can parse a gulpfile or gruntfile and extract the contained tasks allowing you to execute them from inside VS.

To be able to do this I didn’t have many options so I used an hack: executing the file in a javascript engine and reading the option object to identify the tasks.

While this works it has many unhandled corner cases:

• all the grunt utility functions must be present and defined
• all the gulp utility functions must be present and defined
• all the common node functions should be present and defined ( this is almost impossible to do as they are too many)

While this was an hack it worked quite well with just an handful of unhandled cases but everytime someone had a problem I got back to thinking to a better and more robust solution.

Then an idea dawned on me: Why should I mock all these functions and not simply ask to grunt and gulp for the defined config options? While this seems easy to do you have to remember that I cannot simply invoke the command line and look at the results as I need the whole options object for postprocessing and also because it’s not a perfect solution.

WIth some experiments I came to the following node.js code for gulp:

var gulp = require('gulp');
require('./gulpfile');
console.log(Object.keys(gulp.tasks).join(' '));

and a similar snippet for grunt (in this case I also look for subtasks)

var param = grunt.config.data;
var names = [];
for(var prop in param){
	if(param.hasOwnProperty(prop)){
		names.push(prop);
		if(param[prop] === Object(param[prop])){
		    var arr=[];
			for(var innerProp in param[prop]){
				if(param[prop].hasOwnProperty(innerProp)){
					if(innerProp!=='options'){
						arr.push(prop+":"+innerProp);
					}
				}
			}
			if(arr.length > 1){
				for (var i=0;i< arr.length;i++){
					names.push(arr[i]);
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

With these I can let gulp and grunt do the work, trusting the files to be well formed and the necessary plugins installed, then simply invoke this code from .NET thanks to Edge.js.

GruntLauncher is gonna get a serious refactoring..