I’m putting together some notes for an upcoming presentation on LaunchDarkly and feature flags, which I love… This is some notes around some issues I had with setting up the sample PartsUnlimited project. You’d think this would be a slam-dunk; as with all things Visual Studio, it’s not always a direct route that gets you there.

First off, I first tried standing up a dev environment in Azure (slam dunk, and got a souped-up box for $0.11 an hour – whoa!) – and pulling down the demo content. This all worked great, until I tried to build the solution in Visual Studio 2019. I get this error message though that there’s a broken dependency – “local Npm module grunt-sass not found”. Hmm.

After having repeated issues with it, I gave up and walked through these steps start to finish, explicitly – including installing VS2017 Enterprise in parallel with 2019. That means you install an older version of .NET Core (2.2.108), NodeJs (v6.12.3). Guess what? Still had the same issue around grunt-sass. So, looking back, I think I could get it to run on VS2019 no problem – I just had to clean up the project dependencies using “git clean-fdx” cmd-line at the project level, or – last resort – npm uninstall node-sass, followed by install.

Anyway, just to wrap up – for a starter project it’s a little disappointing you have to jump through a fair # of hoops to get it to work. The references are badly out of date and you’d think it wouldn’t take much work to keep it up to date with current versions. But, the fix was fairly easy – navigate to the solution folder (root) and running “git clean-fdx”. If that had failed, I could have uninstalled and then installed node-sass packages (npm uninstall node-sass, then npm install node-sass)

Some thoughts:

• So much good stuff there on the Azure DevOps Demo Generator site. Once I’m done w/mucking around with Terraform, I’m coming back to explore?
• Is it annoying that they completely changed / lobotomized the MSDN subscriber downloads site? You bet it is.

 Anyway, the project builds, no errors. Really a very minor hiccup and in a bizarre way I kinda had fun knocking down potential issues until we hit on the right path.