Power Platform and Dynamics 365
After the Dynamics 365 v9 preview sessions we are now getting a little bit more detail direct from the Microsoft website detailing what the changes mean in practical terms for users, configurers and developers.
Head over to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/get-started/whats-new/ to see the full details or just read my summary below.
Here is my take on some of the major points that caught my attention.
Today I dropped into the Dynamics 365 Insider program for day one of a series of reveals we have all been waiting on for some time now. With the NDA lifted on what Dynamics CRM 9.0 will be, it was an interesting set of changes. To quote some of the technical leads, this is the biggest release Microsoft have made to Dynamics 365 so lets understand what is involved to make it a smooth transition.
Because of other commitments, I only dipped in and out of the sessions so I don’t have all the detail, but here’s a quick summary of the major features I took in and some of my musings around them. As I find out more, I will update this post accordingly.
Continue reading “Dynamics 365 V9.0 Summary (July 2017 Update)”
Day 2 of Summit EMEA started with some useful breakout sessions by Microsoft Partners and MVPs. The first session I attended covered some use cases of Custom Entities. Adam Vero’s session gave an interesting overview of how custom entities can be used for things other than storing business data. The 5 main use cases for custom entities covered were, replacing pick-lists, N-N intersect entities, custom auditing, 1-1 records and for applying arbitrary security privileges to the ribbon or site map. One of the things missing from the Microsoft documentation is covering general CRM design patterns like this, and this session reinforced my understanding of best practice in data modelling in Dynamics 365. Tip of the session was the advice to create a 1-1 relationship to extend the user record with fields that are updated frequently. If you don’t, you may experience performance problems – this is because the browser security cache is invalidated when the user record is updated.
Visual Studio was officially released today, and with it’s release comes the dilemma for Dynamics 365 developers. Do you keep going with VS 2015 (or maybe VS2013, VS 2012 or 2010!), or do you bite the bullet and install Visual Studio 2017?
In the past, I would normally hold off on a new Visual Studio installation until there is a service pack available, but after reading that Visual Studio 2017 is focused on performance improvements and speed, I decided to install it on an Azure Developer VM to see if I could get the Dynamics 365 Developer toolkit working on it.
Continue reading “Install Dynamics 365 Developer Toolkit with Visual Studio 2017”
If you need to install Dynamics CRM 2013 in an environment without internet access, you may prefer to install some of the Dynamics CRM 2013 pre-requisites manually before running Setupserver.exe. The main problem in the past has been, how do I find them?
Well courtesy of Fiddler2, here are the URLs CRM 2013 pings for the some of the pre-req files. This is based on a Windows Server 2008 R2 server, which has had CRM installed on it before, so there may be some missing here. If there are any missing that you need, please let me know and I will add to the table.
Continue reading “Dynamics 2013 Required Components Direct download links”
Today I spent some time trying to track down an error with a fresh install of the Dynamics CRM 2011 311 Portal Accelerator. Having spent a fair amount of time setting it up on a VM and wanting to bulk out the content a bit, I discovered that when trying to edit content from the Front End, I was getting various errors, such as :
Continue reading “Unable to edit content from Front End using Dynamics CRM Portal 311 Accelerator”
If you try to delete the out of the box reports from a Dynamics CRM 2011 system, you will find you will get the error :
“You cannot complete this action for this component because of the configuration of it’s managed properties”.
Continue reading “Unable to delete default Out of the box Reports from Dynamics CRM 2011”
When starting to learn a new product or technology, the first place I always go to get a feel for what I’m in for are the forums and blogs. Rather than believing the hype of the official training courses or marketing material (lies!), the real value is in the experience you get from using the product to do something in the real world.
With that in mind, here are 10 tips for Microsoft Dynamics CRM you are unlikely to find in the official documentation.
Continue reading “10 Dynamics CRM 2011 Tips for Beginners (and maybe some Pros)”
Brian Illand 