Dynamics CRM

I’ve been spending some time with the modern tooling and thought it would help to blog some of the step-by-step to help others. Install PAC CLI Open a command prompt and type pac to see if the Power Platforms CLI (command line interface) is installed on your machine. If you get an error (not found) you’ll need to install the PAC CLI. Go to https://aka.ms/PowerAppsCLI to download the installer. Then run the installer. If the CLI installs successfully than the pac command should run successfully and display a list of commands. ...

What is the Power platform all about? I get this question a lot. The reality is that the Power platform is more than one thing and it can be “about” a lot of different things. PowerApps is a pixel-perfect mobile-first UX app creation for the enterprise. Common Data Service is a ready-to-go no-limits data service for building an application backend. PowerApps is the ability to rapidly build forms and views over that data service with minimal effort. Dynamics 365 is a series of commercial applications ready to run your business processes. Power BI is about analyzing and visualizing data from anywhere. Flow is integrating data from multiple services and automating business processes across those services. ...

Microsoft Inspire 2018 wrapped up on Thursday (7/19) with a Bruno Mars concert. But, before the music there were a bunch of very useful sessions on Microsoft Business Applications (i.e., Dynamics 365, PowerApps, Flow, PowerBI, etc.) Yes, I know the marketing/branding still a bit unclear but hopefully that will be cleared up by James Phillips next week at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit in Seattle. You can find all the session videos from Microsoft Inspire 2018 on the web site. I’ve curated a handful of sessions that would be top of list in prioritizing. I still recommend going through the site and finding other sessions that may be of interest. ...

As a Dynamics 365 (CRM) developer you have probably come to rely on the Dynamics CRM SDK over the years. With the release of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement 9.0 (a.k.a. July 2017 Update) the old downloadable SDK has been replaced by an online document set and NuGet packages. This allows the SDK to become more of a living document where everyone is always referencing the most up-to-date information from Microsoft. Overall, I believe this is a big positive for developers which will make for a better development experience. ...

A client of mine recently asked for support to show the next birthday for a contact. Often there will be an ask for a list view of contacts with a birthday in the next month. In this post I’m going to show you how to use a business rule and calculated fields to achieve this functionality without writing any code. This will be a a native calculated field so it can be used in lists, forms, queries, etc. ...

I’ve become a big fan of extension methods over the years to make my development work in Dynamics CRM, easier to implement and easier to read (i.e., easier to support.) Extension methods allow us to, exactly as the name implies, extended an existing class or interface with new methods - its a simpler version of implementing a derived class. Anyone familiar with developing .NET code for Dynamics CRM will be familiar with the IOrganizationService interface and its varied implementations. While in most cases I’m a fan of implementing my own version of IOrganizationService, often for code-base simplicity I’ll rely on some extension methods for my code. ...

The very smart folks over at PowerObjects recently posted a blog article on how to retrieve the membership of an Access Team using SQL. When working in CRM Online or when we need to use the query for a view we have to make our SQL statements work as FetchXML. Here is the FetchXML that will retrieve Access Team members. You can edit it for the desired entity and place filtering as appropriate. In this case, we are retrieving all the Opportunity records and User records for the Opportunity Sales Teams (CRM’s default OOTB example of Access Teams.)

This evening I was at a major national electronics retailer to purchase a new television. I recently moved into a new place and needed a television sized appropriately for the room (and, my old television being plasma, something that would run cooler to save money on air conditioning.) There was a very nice sales person - not too much pressure (and, being honest, didn’t know much about televisions) but there to help when I needed it. I had already done some research and really just needed to see a few models side-by-side to make a final decision. It probably didn’t take me more than thirty minutes to decide which television I wanted, at which point the sales person sprung into action. ...

Being able to use external DLLs in Dynamics CRM plugins is challenging but doable. Most people who have been doing development on the Dynamics CRM platform for any period of time know that it is not enough to simply reference the DLLs in Visual Studio - you must somehow make them available to run on the server - this can range from mildly annoying to impossible (if you using CRM Online.) ...

Recently a question was asked about creating forms and specifying a default form in Dynamics CRM that was limited to specific group of users. The original question and answer are available on Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is a great site for asking and getting answers to your Dynamics CRM questions. You already have a default form for the entity that is used by all users (All Users). You want to add an additional form to that entity that is only available to some of the users (Select Users). All Users are currently assigned a security role that gives them the necessary access to the system. ...