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