Emit published files on web publish

[Niksko]

Hi

Not sure if this is possible, and it's sort of been discussed elsewhere, but would it be possible to emit the published files as a readable stream when you're doing a web publish? This would make this module MUCH more gulp like, because then you could simply call this plugin and pipe it to a destination.

If not (and I realize this is asking a lot), but do you have any idea as to how to wrap this module to accomplish this? I've tried a bunch of times, but I can't seem to figure out how to wait until the publish has finished (by waiting for the stream to emit an end event) before returning the src stream on the publish location. I run into issues because I need to return some sort of stream from within the task, but I can't really return a stream with a gulp.src until the publish has finished, because the globs in the gulp.src are evaluated immediately and they find no files.

[hoffi]

I really agree with your point. The problem is that I'm not really familiar with web publish, so any insights about this would help because I don't know if and how I can detect the files that where published.

[Niksko]

I'm slowly getting a little better at using gulp and dealing with streams, so I may be able to provide a PR for this in the future.

A web publish is either performed to a location defined in a .pubxml file, or it is defined as a parameter to msbuild.

Two options immediately spring to mind:

1. We publish to a system defined temporary folder and then emit the files from there.
2. The more elegant solution would be to somehow mock the filesystem so that msbuild doesn't actually write anything, however this seems pretty difficult.

[Niksko]

I've successfully implemented a wrapper around gulp-msbuild that implements this functionality. I'd like to submit a pull request to add this functionality, but I'd like some input from @hoffi around the behaviour and options we add.

I propose we add a few options:

emitPublishedFiles

Boolean, when true the published files are emitted as a stream of vinyl files

publishDirectory

String, sets the PublishDir argument to msbuild, controls where the files are published to. Defaults to <os temp directory>/<come up with some suitable subfolder>/<uuid v4>

The only other question would be, what validation do we do? I propose we throw an error if a user tries to use the publishDirectory option without emitPublishedFiles set to true. Do we also throw an error if emitPublishedFiles is set to true, but the list of targets doesn't contain the Publish target? Or perhaps just a warning that this option will not do anything because Publish wasn't passed.

[hoffi]

Looks good to me, but i would not validate on the targets. I think that would be to restricitive if someone uses a custom target for this.
Is it possible that emitPublishedFiles just does not emit anything in that case?