Update to what I've found. The angular-cli application is very tanky and handles a lot of configurable tasks (serve, templating, build, sass, test, bundling, aot, treeshaking, etc.), that are going to be very cumbersome to reproduce with a gulp file, so you're better off keeping it. Visual studio does not have first class support for angular, so you have to take a few more steps to make it work. I'm following bits and pieces from the guides below. Hopefully I can end with a .net project structure and workflow that is maintainable and can be easily picked up by other developers on the team. http://www.mithunvp.com/using-angular-2-asp-net-mvc-5-visual-studio/ http://candordeveloper.com/2017/04/12/how-to-use-angular-cli-with-visual-studio-2017/    

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So basically, even if you use grunt, gulp or any task automation software, under the hood in most cases (if not all) it will use ng build under the hood. You can go along with either of them, just you can use our command there to build your app.

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