Sunday, April 28, 2019

Dockerizing nginx using jwilder/dockerize

Today, most technology stacks are really well suited to be dockerized (e.g. spring boot, cypress.io, .NET core to name a few).

However, still some lack good support for the usual 12x factor app guidelines like

One such example is nginx. It is configured using conf.d-dropins, by default starts in background and does not log to stdout. 

But using Jason Wilder's dockerize tool written in golang it's been a quick breeze to make nginx into a docker-friendly reverse proxy dynamically configured to proxy to this very blog.

Jason's example became a bit dated since nginx is still moving fast. So i updated it for nginx 1.16. You can find the code at mkoertgen/hello.dockerize. Enjoy!

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Fixing the #Teams Addin Installation in #Outlook

TL;DR gist: Microsoft Teams Outlook AddIn Hacks

In projects inclined to the Microsoft ecosystem, Teams is probably the best collaboration option, especially if your team members are dislocated.

Probably because using different Office 365 accounts i had a hard time getting the Teams-Addin to work with Outlook. This is a know problem as you can find numerous articles on the web from people asking for help about this issue. Microsoft is working to enhance the Teams / Outlook experience.

One especially helpful article was https://realtimeuc.com/2017/08/missing-teams-outlook-add-in/ by Michael LaMontagne (@RealTimeUC). Michael was the only one trying to dig deeper into the nitty-gritty details of COM-registration between Outlook and the Teams .NET application, deployed using Squirrel.Windows (as most Electron-based desktop-apps on Windows, e.g. Slack etc.).

He finally got the Teams-AddIn working by duplicating registry keys from a working machine.

However, after reviewing the Teams & Teams Meeting AddIn startup behavior, it's even simpler.

On installation, the Microsoft Teams application always COM-registers the Team-Addin for Outlook. However, if not enabled for your Outlook/Office365 subscription, it deletes a few registry keys on startup, so Outlook simply won't load it on startup.

So here is how to hack the Teams Meeting Button into Outlook:

1. Start Teams (deletes registry keys!)
2. Add registry keys (see below)
3. Start Outlook

Unfortunately, you will have repeat this everytime you restart Teams.

Hopefully this helps someone going down the same road!

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DoNotDisableAddinList]
"TeamsAddin.Connect"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Resiliency\DoNotDisableAddinList]
"TeamsAddin.Connect"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\TeamsAddin.Connect]
"Description"="Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office"
"FriendlyName"="Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office"
"LoadBehavior"=dword:00000003