Category: Tools

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” →

Integrating FetchXML Builder with other plugins

~ Jonas Rapp ~ 1 Comment

With the next release of FetchXML Builder for XrmToolBox it is possible for other tools to benefit from the UI FetchXML Builder offers to compose queries to be used for any purpose.

The MessageBus functionality introduced in pull request #101 of XrmToolBox makes it possible to communicate between plugins within the tool. Continue reading “Integrating FetchXML Builder with other plugins” →

Introduction to FetchXML Builder

~ Jonas Rapp ~ Leave a comment

FXB-659-white
FetchXML Builder for XrmToolBox is getting more and more attention and is now downloaded and used in most parts of the world. Current numbers indicate a total download count of about 1600, and top count for a single version is close to 400. So I figured it was probably time to write an introduction to the tool, though I have actually received very few questions about how to use it (is it really that intuitive and self-explanatory??) There is now a page on this blog dedicated to FetchXML Builder with brief information on how to use the tool and what features it offers. It begins like this: Continue reading “Introduction to FetchXML Builder” →