Task Runner Explorer can't load tasks

I had the same problem migrating from VS2013 recently.

As Josh noted in his comment here Visual Studio 2015 ships with an older version of Node. In case you don't want to get stuck with whatever version of Node is built into Visual Studio, you can tell it to use the version you have already installed.

  • Go to: Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > External Web Tools
  • Reorder so that $(PATH) is above $(DevEnvDir)\Extensions\Microsoft\Web Tools\External

This also applies to other tools like Grunt, Bower and Gulp.

Found this solution by Mads Kristensen here.

For Visual Studio 2017, we can find the setting at
Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > Web Package Management > External Web Tools


It seems gulp-sass searchs node-sass in a different location. Here is a temporary solution.

  1. create a new directory named win32-ia32-11 inside c:\Projects\Test\node_modules\gulp-sass\node_modules\node-sass\vendor\

  2. Goto https://github.com/sass/node-sass-binaries and download win32-ia32-11_binding.node.

  3. Copy win32-ia32-11_binding.node file to c:\Projects\Test\node_modules\gulp-sass\node_modules\node-sass\vendor\win32-ia32-11\ and rename it to binding.node

Visual Studio Gulp - Task Runner


I have tried all above solutions but it doesn't work and I found another solution here.

You have to force Visual Studio run with your Node.js version:

  1. Go to Tools > Options in Visual Studio 2015
  2. Go to Projects and Solutions > External Web Tools
  3. Add the following path: C:\Program Files\nodejs