Category: Tools

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

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 17 Comments

During my eight years as a Microsoft Dynamics CRM / 365 developer, I have felt a strong pain every time it was time to package and distribute a customer or product implementation.

Over the years our tools have evolved to now support a complete automated process; from source repository via compilation, updating dev environment, exporting solutions and configuration, collecting the artifacts and compose deployment packages to be installed manually or by VSTS release management.

This is the first article of three 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   My hope is that these articles will inspire you to take your delivery process to the next stage by implementing automation through CI and what is usually called DevOps. If you are already there, these articles should provide an alternative solution, which may or may not suit your needs today, but might be worth considering.

It started with the data

Back in the days of CRM 4.0 we started delivering systems that were based more and more on generic configurable functionality. The benefit of having an automated way of delivering and moving configuration data between CRM environments was becoming increasingly obvious. This was long before utilities like the Configuration Migration Tool, so we started to draw the blueprints to develop the functionality we needed. Basically, what we needed was to grab a bunch of data from a source environment to persist it in a file, and later push it into another CRM organization.

Continue reading “Build and Deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects using VSTS – part I” →

Developing plugins for analysis – part IV

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 4 Comments

At the eXtreme365 conference in Lisbon, Portugal I did a session on plugin development with focus on adapting your code to empower the tracing and investigation features available in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.
In this final article from that session I will dig deeper into how use the Correlation Id to trace plugin execution chains.

Continue reading “Developing plugins for analysis – part IV” →

Developing plugins for analysis – part III

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 4 Comments

At the eXtreme365 conference in Lisbon, Portugal I did a session on plugin development with focus on adapting your code to empower the tracing and investigation features available in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.
This is the third article from that session where the Plugin Trace Viewer is explained.

Continue reading “Developing plugins for analysis – part III” →

Developing plugins for analysis – part I

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 3 Comments

At the eXtreme365 conference in Lisbon, Portugal I did a session on plugin development with focus on adapting your code to empower the tracing and investigation features available in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.
ICYMI: This article is the first in a series to describe the essence of that session.

Continue reading “Developing plugins for analysis – part I” →

Developing plugins for analysis – part II

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 1 Comment

At the eXtreme365 conference in Lisbon, Portugal I did a session on plugin development with focus on adapting your code to empower the tracing and investigation features available in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform.
This is the second article in a series to describe the essence of that session.

Continue reading “Developing plugins for analysis – part II” →

CRM Saturday – XrmToolBox with Jonas Rapp

~ Jonas Rapp ~ Leave a comment

CRM Saturday is a recurring event where Microsoft Dynamics CRM/365 experts and MVPs gather for a day filled with sessions from both strategic and technical perspectives on everything from user adoption to plugin unit testing to IoT and intelligent analysis.

On Saturday January 28 the event was held in London, UK at the Microsoft offices in Paddington. As a “senior contributor” to the world famous XrmToolBox by MVP Tanguy Touzard I was invited to do a session on simplifying development using XrmToolBox. image My session covered a brief XrmToolBox background, examples of my own favorite tools, and deep dive demos of FetchXML Builder and Plugin Trace Viewer. Of course you cannot do a demo with some customizations and plugins without using a few other XrmToolBox tools, so I did not only cover my own block busters… The presentation from the event is now available here: CRM Saturday – XrmToolBox with Jonas Rapp This contains the full presentation, and also step by step details on the demos performed, as well as some bonus demos that did not fit the tight session schedule. Note that the presentation also contains reference to a free to use GitHub repository with a simple plugin base class, that can be inherited instead of simply implementing the SDK interface IPlugin to greatly simplify plugin development and logging to the Tracing Service. The repository is available here: https://github.com/rappen/JonasPluginBase

If you would like to dig even deeper into the tracing service, XrmToolBox and the Plugin Trace Viewer – join me on my session on this topic during eXtreme365 for Partners in Lisbon, Portugal that takes place March 13-15 2017 !

  If you have any questions regarding the presentation, demo or the plugin base class, don’t hesitate to contact me!   More information on CRM Saturday: http://crmsaturday.com
More information on eXtreme365: http://extremecrm.com

Windows app for Microsoft Dynamics CRM in 5 minutes

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 2 Comments

 

Thanks to open source components for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can develop a WinForm application for CRM in 5 minutes.

  In this blog article, I will go through a few simple steps to get up to speed developing a client that connects to and shows information from Microsoft Dynamics CRM by using two open source spinoff components: ConnectionManager from XrmToolBox and CRMGridView from FetchXML Builder.   These four simple steps are all that is required:

  1. Create project and add NuGet packages
  2. Make VS aware of the imported user control
  3. Configure a form with CRMGridView
  4. Add a few lines of code

1. Create project and add NuGet packages

In Visual Studio, create a new WinForm Project. image Right click the solution, select Manage NuGet Packages for Solution. In the search field, type Cinteros.Xrm image Install Cinteros.Xrm.CRMWinForm. Continue reading “Windows app for Microsoft Dynamics CRM in 5 minutes” →