Balancing Cool Tech, Usability and TCO

I’m a techie.
I like new, shiny,
cool stuff.

Newest however, usually
costs.
And customers usually like cheap.

Users don’t care about either.
They just want a system that
empowers more than it obstructs.

So how do you find the balance between the three? Is it even possible? Or is it just another
Project Management Triangle?

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No more Export as Unmanaged

Ever since “CRM 2011” Microsoft has been pushing the message that we should have unmanaged solutions only in Development environments. That message is being emphasized even more as we walk into the new Power Platform era.
Ideas have been raised that one day we might not be allowed to import unmanaged solutions to an environment that is not explicitly tagged for Development.

I would suggest completely removing the possibility to export solutions as unmanaged.

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The Milliseconds Are Here!

Ever since I started using the Plugin Trace Log for investigation of my plugins around three years ago, I have wondered why we don’t have timestamps with better granularity than seconds.
As I expressed it in an article from 2017:

Given the CPU power we have today, it is just incomprehensible why we should not get more detail in the timing of plugin execution.
It is like defining my age by saying I was born sometime during the second half of the 20th century.

From A Canary in CRM
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Dynamic content in Auto Numbers for Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM

As the creator of the Auto Number Manager tool in XrmToolBox, I get two questions more than any other questions:

How can I number existing records?

How can I add dynamic content to the numbers?

In a previous article I gave my solution to the first question. I will now dive into the second one and show a simple way of adding dynamic information from the numbered entity and related entities into the numbered attribute.

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We create XrmToolBox tools at Dynamics 365 Saturdays!

Jonas Rapp creating XrmToolBox tools at D365 Saturdays

The community of developers for Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM in general and for XrmToolBox in particular is a great bunch of people. But I wish there were more of us – the more the merrier ?

The D365 Saturday phenomenon with pro bono speakers at a full day event, free of charge for participants, has spread like wildfire over the last couple of years.
The connection to the XrmToolBox is obvious:

  • Both were started by CRM heroes (Raz for the Saturdays and Tanguy for the toolbox).
  • Both are driven by a passion to share and a love for the platform.
  • Both do these things without any ambition to “get rich quick” (or ever).

I got an idea to combine these two phenomena.

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Auto Numbering existing records in Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM

As the creator of the Auto Number Manager tool in XrmToolBox, I get two questions more than any other questions:

How can I number existing records?

How can I add dynamic content to the numbers?

Auto Number Manager for XrmToolBox

To answer these questions once and for all, I will post my suggestions in two articles. I will step way outside my comfort zone of coding the solutions and give you strictly no-code alternatives.
Well, I do feel reasonably comfortable, since I wrote the code in the tools we need… ?

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We created an XrmToolBox tool at Dynamics 365 Saturday Stockholm!

Last Saturday some 100+ experts, partners and user of Microsoft Dynamics 365 met up at the Microsoft offices in Stockholm, Sweden for a day packed with content at the Dynamics 365 Saturday event.

I delivered two sessions at the event, and in one of them I took on a somewhat challenging session called

Let’s build an XrmToolBox tool!

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Managed or Unmanaged solutions – a hot case still slightly open

The case is obviously not entirely closed.

My recent article Case closed: Managed or Unmanaged solutions in Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM received a lot of attention, and sparked writers, podcasters, tweeters and commenters around the world to give feedback, yell at me, agree with me, or simply continue the discussion both publicly and privately.

Readers of the “Case Closed” article last week.

I have received virtual hugs and probably lost quite a few followers.

I really enjoy following and participating in the discussion, and one comment I got today from Anthony Ellis (read it here) inspired me to write a follow-up article. So here it goes.

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