wickchuck

I work at a medium sized company, and we use VMware Horizon View for our dev environment. A few years back we switched to develop using Visual Studio and C# and now have a number of projects we have to run to get the dev environment up and running. In general VMware Horizon View is nice because it allows for a flexible remote/work environment and can hop on your machine anywhere in the office as needed, but the major drawback is that the server-based PC's just don't have the raw horsepower needed compared to a shiny new PC all spec'd out. Looking for other alternatives that will run as fast as a local dev box, but still give the flexibility of something like VMWare Horizon View. We are also mostly on prem, so other cloud-based solutions would be harder to get working with all of the various Api's and file shares that we need access to in order for it to work. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I keep running into issues on windows using tools like Gulp or Grunt. The issues I'm running up against is long file names and deep node_module folders which end up causing errors like "file path too long". Also, if i end up moving or deleting one of these projects after running "npm install" the amount of time it takes is incredible due to the amount of files in the node_modules folder. I've also had to use robocopy to remove the long file names in some cases. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong...

The scenario I'm up against is that we don't use a mainstream language, so no tooling really exists. I'm trying to bolt on a solution(think asset pipeline) and seemed like Gulp would fit the bill. I'm able to get Gulp to do what I want I'm just not that pleased with the amount of steps needed to get to that point and the pain associated with moving/deleting projects.

What I'm wondering if there is a way to take your current gulp build process and convert it to a binary, or compile it to a single .js file that you could script against? Or if there are binaries out there that can do this sort of thing. My starting point with this was the gulp-webapp template.

Any ideas, thoughts, would be awesome!