Visual Studio 2015 Task Runner Explorer not recognising gulpfile.babel.js

Question

Task Runner Explorer in Visual Studio 2015 is not picking up and showing the tasks from my gulpfile.babel.js

I have made sure to point Visual Studio to use the Node on my machine

The version of Node I have is 8.9.3 and the version of gulp is 3.9.1 and the same with Gulp CLI.

The version of Visual Studio I have is 14.0.25431.01 Update 3.

This works for colleagues on other machines and as far as I'm aware update 3 fixed the issue of not recognising babel js files.

Answer 1

Make sure you've done an npm i (i = shorthand for install), so that gulp can actually be found inside .\node_modules\.bin. Setting that as one of the external tool locations in Visual studio causes Visual Studio to search for gulp in that folder.

BTW in VS 2019 the options have moved to:

Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > Web Package Management > External Web Tools