Author: Jonas Rapp

FetchXML Builder and Friends at D365UG Virtual Summer Camp

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 2 Comments

On August 7-9, the first ever Virtual Summer Camp for the Dynamics 365 platform will take place.

During this free event the D365UG offer some 30+ sessions with focus on Customer Service and Field/Project Service.

I will be doing one of a few cross vertical sessions, where I discuss and demonstrate some useful XrmToolBox tools that help customizers, administrators and users with information analysis and enhancing the capabilities of the system.

Below is a description of my session – enjoy and make sure you sign up! Click the link: D365UG Virtual Summer Camp

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Relationship data analysis with XrmToolBox

Dynamics CRM entity model
~ Jonas Rapp ~ 8 Comments

Relationships in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CRM) and PowerApps Model Driven Apps can be decorated with a number of characteristics that define their behavior. These characteristics instruct the platform how to behave in regard to child data when different actions are taken on the parent record of the relationship.

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Use Azure DevOps to publish XrmToolBox tools

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 14 Comments

Recently a fellow D365 developer, Lars Müller, wrote an article on how to Build a versioned XrmToolBox plugin.

I am taking this one step further, to show you how to create a complete CI/CD pipeline for your XrmToolBox tools.

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Five ways to improve Quality and Productivity of Dynamics 365 development

~ Jonas Rapp ~ Leave a comment

a.k.a – Once I did a session twice

Just like last year in Lisbon, I did a developer focused session during eXtreme365 in Dubrovnik. Last year I had full focus on how to develop plugins for analysis, primarily using the Plug-in Trace Log in the code and how to best analyze the results of it.
This year I took a bit wider approach with an ambition to help developers become more productive and get higher quality of their code. In this article I will go through the five different areas I covered in the session.

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FetchXML Builder for Microsoft Dynamics 365/CRM got an extreme makeover

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 7 Comments

 

The first release of FetchXML Builder for XrmToolBox in 2018 contains a major face-lift.

New year – new design! After more than three years since first release, the time has come to use all the feedback from issues on GitHub, comments on Twitter, and collected statistics to improve the UI. This article describes some of the major changes introduced with the first release of 2018.

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More Auto Numbering features

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 13 Comments

In my previous article I described the details of the new Auto Number attributes feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365, and how to manage them using Auto Number Manager for XrmToolBox.

Since this article, a few new possibilities have been verified to be supported.

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Auto Number attributes in Microsoft Dynamics 365

Auto Number Manager in XrmToolBox
~ Jonas Rapp ~ 61 Comments

With the release of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement October service update (v9.0), two of the most requested customization features were finally implemented in the platform:

  • Multi-select optionsets
  • Custom auto numbered attributes
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A canary in CRM

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 5 Comments

Have you ever faced a situation when you don’t know why your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement system behaves the way it does, or why your own plugins behave the way they do?

If you have, this might be a good time to put a canary in your system.

– A what?
– A canary. 

You know when we were manually laboring down the coal mines, it happened that drilling into the rock inadvertently let out poisonous gas. So we brought in cages with canary birds putting their life at stake, to save our coal miners’ lives. The canaries were signaling the content of the atmosphere long before the coal miners would detect something dangerous. They did this by suddenly being upside down, instead of happily chattering.

As a plugin developer of many years, I have added extra tracing to my plugins more times than I can count and sometimes even added steps for more messages than necessary, and I am sure most of you reading this post have too, in one way or another.

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Public Preview: Build and Deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects using VSTS

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 6 Comments

Recently I posted a series of three articles describing our approach to DevOps for Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the technology behind it.
After giving a session on this topic at CRM Saturday in Madrid, Spain, it is now time to announce “public preview” of our tools.

If you want the full story – these are the articles describing the background and technology behind our tools:

Part I – Background and how our DevOps tools evolved before we knew about it
Part II – Automation of the build and deploy process using custom VSTS Build Tasks
Part III – Demo of complete build and release definitions taking you from A to Z

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Build and Deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects using VSTS – part III

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 7 Comments

This is the third and last article telling the tale of our own DevOps for Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the technology behind it.

Part I – Background and how our DevOps tools evolved before we knew about it
Part II – Automation of the build and deploy process using custom VSTS Build Tasks
Part III – Demo of complete build and release definitions taking you from A to Z
After the first two articles we have now got a handful custom VSTS Build Tasks to help us take the build and deployment automation all the way. This final article demonstrates how we do that with VSTS builds and releases. Finally raising the questions of why we did all this and where to go from here.

A complete VSTS Build for Microsoft Dynamics 365

image_thumb113Below is a sample of a full build process that not only builds and packs a new CRM solution, but updates the individual assemblies and webresources in DEV environment, exports solutions and data, and then publishes the files exported from DEV together with Shuffle Definitions and Package Definition, which is the resulting build artifact.

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