gulp

I’ve been absent for a while – sometimes it’s difficult to find time for blogging even when I want it. Anyway… here’s the last post in the introductory series of posts that explain my NAV TechDays 2019 demos. In this code example, I explain the difference between typical development and production build configurations, and I show how to configure gulp accordingly.

After a short absence, I am back. The next lesson in the Control Add-ins Supercharged series I am introducing Babel . “Babel is a JavaScript compiler” , says babeljs.io. So, what’s the big deal, you may ask? The big deal is that Babel will take your super-fancy high-end future-generation JavaScript…

So far I’ve shown how to configure gulp to help you with some basic JavaScript development tasks, such as bundling and minifying, and how to automate builds on every source file change. Let’s now take it to an entirely new level: debugging.

Yesterday you’ve seen how to use gulp to make it do something truly useful: bundling your JavaScript and CSS files. Introducing gulp for the purpose of bundling your files allows you to split your functionality into as many files as you want, but use only a single script and a single stylesheet file from your control add-in.

My last demo introduces gulp, an amazingly simple task automation tool. You’ve seen what it is, how to set it up, and how to create a simple hello-world task. Now it’s time to teach gulp some useful tricks and make it automate the “build” process for the JavaScript and CSS files.

Get ready for the next big step in taking the control add-in development to the next level. Today, I am (re)introducing gulp. I’ve blogged about gulp in the past, but I’ve never really finished that series. Life and work got in the way.

In the last post , I explained how to use tasks, but I didn’t explain yet how to make them useful. Tasks are most useful when they automate certain file operations, and gulp helps with reading and writing files. However, if you need to perform a transformation, then you need to look for plugins that can get that work done for you.

Now that you know how to get gulp up and running in VS Code , and how to export tasks from your gulp file , let’s talk about tasks themselves. What are they, what are they good for, and how to write them. Gulp – being a task automation tool – is all about tasks.

In my last post I covered the very basics of getting started with gulp in VS Code. It was all about getting gulp up and running under the hood of VS Code, and about writing your very first gulp task. It didn’t do much, but it showed you what gulpfile.js is good for and how to export tasks from it, that you can later use from VS Code.

Strange times. I never stop to be amazed with the kinds tools that invaded our pristine development environments. One of those tools is gulp , and if you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry. Why should you hear of it? A couple of weeks ago I introduced my talk on gulp by explaining how I made it simplify and speed up my development of control add-ins.