Reinventing the System.Web.Optimization wheel with gulp
For a long time, I was using the standard bundling and minification System.Web.Optimization framework to deliver bundled and minified JavaScript and CSS to users of our app. In one of Azure's more frustrating changes, the 'In Role' cache was removed from the Cloud Service offering. The only cache choice now is Redis. Which is great, but it caused us some infrequent problems with bundles getting "stuck". We'd have to run a console application to clear out all of the bundle information in Redis whenever that happened. We had need for a better front end build anyway as we started to explore replacements for angular (e.g. Aurelia) so decided to add bespoke bundling and minification. The actual implementation is more complex than what I'll show here because the code runs 2 'brands' (sites), each in 3 different countries. Let's assume the code runs one brand in one deployment instead! Config The bundles are configured in a file called "