This post is part of the series "the road to Visual Studio free frontend development":

• Frontend life with Visual Studio
• Frontend life without Visual Studio

You can browse the code of this post on github.

In the previous part I showed how to manage a pure html website and I spoke about the good (few) and the bad (too much) parts of web development based on Visual Studio.

It's time to go back and enhance my technical requirements. I need to:

1. Use a platform independent ide/editor
2. Make the project as independent possible from the ide (no project files)
3. Enable one click (or command) setup of my dev environment
4. Include into the project only what I need
5. Manage simple library dependencies

write the code

Take a breath and start choosing your favourite ide/editor (for this context). Mine is vim (the reason is out of scope for now), but choose what you want: there are great, lightweight and platform independent ides out of there; if you are confused and you want something more simple than vim, take a look at lightable or webstorm.
By choosing the (right) ide/editor I solve the first two points.

build the code

Points 3 and 4 require a task runner that automate repetitive tasks including minification, compilation and publishing of the project resources. The most famous and widly used task runner in the web development is **Grunt**: I will be banal and hiding myself in the crowd.

manage dependencies

Now I have only one requirement to deal with: manage the dependencies of the project. How I can fetch and install packages? Again, how I can use packages without going crazy? The First question is solved by a package manager; the latter is solved by a dependency manager.
If I were banal again, I would choose Bower as a package manager and RequireJs as a dependency manager, but that's not not the case: I'm leaving a bit of suspence before speaking about the management of library dependencies because Grunt is the theme of next the post of this series....