Uncategorized on Nicolas Nowinski

10 Choices for a Better Future No Matter What Happens

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:23:53 +0000

I’m not a fan of traditional New Years Resolutions, as I wrote about here, but as we started 2026 I wanted to think even a bit more differently about the problem of improvement. First, I don’t think anyone can know what the future holds - and anyone saying they do know, is lying or delusional or both. And while there may be things that make sense to do now (and you should therefore do them) they won’t necessarily makes sense in six or eight months. So I don’t really think we should be building plans around the fact that it just happens to be January 1st any more than we should around March 8th or June 17th or August 22nd or any other random day. Further, I didn’t want to set a simple achievable goal because simple achievable goals don’t have staying power - they won’t usually be powering you years down the road. I wanted to create something that could be applicable forever (in theory) and wasn’t situation dependent, since I don’t know what the future holds.

Calculating Next Anniversary/Birthday Date in Dataverse with Power Fx (Revisited)

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 03:21:49 +0000

About 4 1/2 years ago I wrote a post on how to calculate a next anniversary (birthday) date in Dynamics 365. It’s been a top 3 post according to Google Analytics. I’m proud of that solution because it was a real no-code solution to a common requirement for lots of applications (especially CRM systems.)

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.

Balancing Life in a time of COVID-19

Wed, 22 Apr 2020 01:15:39 +0000

People have been forced in a matter of weeks to go from a lifetime of maximization seeking to a balancing strategy. That is an abrupt change for which many people were not mentally prepared. We will all adjust but it will take time and it will not be without individual challenges.

Dynamics CRM: SQL to Get CRM Metadata in 2011 & 2013

Wed, 26 Mar 2014 23:34:37 +0000

Occasionally, I need (or want – depending on your preference) a list of all the attributes (basic CRM metadata) in a Dynamics CRM organization. While there are several ways, including some great document generators, that will get such a list for you, SQL is always an option. If you are on-premises, or working in a developer VM, you can run this query against a CRM organization database to get the basic details. It can also be used as a starter for more complicated metadata query requirements. SELECT en.LogicalName , en.ObjectTypeCode , att.LogicalName , typ.Description , typ.XmlType FROM MetadataSchema.Entity en JOIN MetadataSchema.Attribute att on en.EntityId = att.EntityId JOIN MetadataSchema.AttributeTypes typ on att.AttributeTypeId = typ.AttributeTypeId ORDER BY en.LogicalName , att.LogicalName

Dynamics CRM 2011: Abstracting Plugin Setup

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 17:15:00 +0000

Originally published at http://bit.ly/RIxgt9

How people do it today…

Often times when looking at Dynamics CRM plugin code that someone else has written – or that I have written in the past, I’m presented with a large collection of setup and validation code at the start of the Execute method. Overtime it becomes obvious that this is simply cluttering up our core Plugin code with what is really overhead infrastructure work.