Tips and Tricks: TFS Excel Plugin not loading

Problem:

Close an Excel spreadsheet with/or without having a TFS/VSTS connected list. When you open the spreadsheet again, the Team tab is missing in the ribbon bar.

You then need to go through and re-enable the plugin through Excel options to reload the plugin and get the Team tab back.

This also disconnects your TFS/VSTS linked worksheets, causing you to have to reconnect or re-open a query to carry on working with the work items.

Solution:

1. With Excel closed, open up the registry editor (regedit)
2. Then navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Excel\Addins , and find the TFCOfficeShim entries:
   
   There may be more than one, and the version number at the end may differ to the image above
3. I simply remove/delete the “older versions”  (I surely do not have to remind you to take a backup of your registry before you make any changes),
4. and then find the “LoadBehavior” in the “folder” and make sure that the value is 3

Now re-open the spreadsheet and see if it will load automatically.

Using Office UI Fabric to create a VSTS Extension

In the beginning

In the beginning god wanted to make earth. So, god found a cool looking bootstrapper and loaded up his favorite command line.
God then stepped through and downloaded all 100’s of packages to be able to run the bootstrapper and then the bootstrapper itself:

npm install create-planet -g

God created earth create-planet earth and all was good for a few days. God then decided he wanted to do more. Humans were missing.

npm install human

+ <human@0.0.1>
added 1702 packages in 5904.903s

God then referenced "humans" in earth.js and tried to compile.

Module not found: Error: Can't resolve sin

Ok, no biggy, npm install sin. Compile.

[at-loader] ./node_modules/@types/Inhabitants/index.d.ts:90:13
TS2403: Subsequent variable declarations must have the same type. Variable
'intellegentlife' must be of type 'Homosapiens', but here has type 'Neanderthal'

Ok, remove package Neanderthal. Compile.

earthpack error -ERROR in earth.js from UglifyUniverse Unexpected token: name (continentParts)

Earthpack.. where did that come from? Ok...
5 hours later, god found the Earthpack config and was able to fix the configuration, and the compile was good.

So god ran earth and was promptly told:
Universe.js Error: Invariant Violation: Minified World error #379.

Then there was a big bang.

An now…

I took on a project a while back to summarise and write a “quick start” series of posts for the ALM/DevOps Rangers to highlight the usage of Office UI Fabric. This meant that I needed to get my head around changing an existing extension from “simple” Typescript to React while incorporating Office UI components.  As you may have summised from the above analogy, I have spent way to much time trying to get things running the way that I want them to, based off of someone else's concepts, intentions and bootstrapping.

If you are interested in the outcomes, please follow the series posted on the msdn blog:

1. The start

Containers on Azure as part of a CI/CD pipeline

In my previous posts I was speaking about the journey to go from setting up a container and ultimately publishing it in a continuous fashion to a registry using VSTS.

You may have noticed that a lot of time has elapsed since my last post, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

First of all, the impediment of work, secondly, I noticed a trend where it became fairly popular to blog about the journey from where I ended off and I hung back and followed those for a while.

Instead of me going ahead and creating a bunch of posts to show how to publish your container and run it in production, I’m going to hand it off to a bunch of other capable people :-)

To delve deeper, or just for more information, these are all good reads:

• Windows finally came to the party with Windows based containers
• Introduction to Azure Container Service for Kubernetes
• Walk through on managing a Kubernetes container service on Azure
• Webcasts giving a good overview of the DevOps processes around leveraging containers
• Create a CI/CD pipeline for containerized ASP.NET Core projects
• Setting up CI/CD for Docker Container Running in Kubernetes using VSTS
• Running Web API using Docker and Kubernetes
• Team Yoman generator by Donovan Brown, that will create most of the infrastructure for you
• Continuous Deployment, Kubernetes to Azure Container Service

And if you are interested in a brief discussion on how to move to a microservices based architecture this is a good read : Modernizing a Monolithic Application using Microservices and Azure