Posts on Nicolas Nowinski

Keys to a Successful Life: Groundings, Choices, Purpose

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:59:39 +0000

I wrote a piece back at the start of the year called 10 Choices For a Better Future that was largely focused on behaviorally based choices, I now realize. Just to be clear there is no big plan here I just write this stuff when I’m thinking about it and have time and have some motivation. And in discussing this with someone I occasionally mentor recently (okay a couple months ago) I realized that while that list was good from a choosing how to behave daily standpoint (which is what I writing it for) it didn’t really provide any thinking how to make choices about your life, and that’s a problem because you could apply everything in that piece and still make stupid unguided choices.

With AI, Written Language Matters Most

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 01:20:19 +0000

I’m not 100% certain I love this article. I made myself write it in less than one hour. It’s core point is supposed to be around written language being the dominant skill going forward which replaces today’s primary skill of knowing how to do stuff (visual skill). I will likely revisit this topic in the future as I think about it more.

For at least the next 5-10 years, professional work is going to become more language-based, not less. We are entering a period where being able to express yourself clearly in writing will be more critical than ever.

Can AI predict weather? AI's DC Snow Forecast

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:10:43 +0000

I had a little fun a few days ago having AI do some forecasting for this weekend DC winter weather event. Figured now that it’s Thursday night I would give the AI chatbots a chance to create a new forecast as we have more updated models. Below is the prompt and the results.

I’ve updated my prompt a bunch. I’m really interested in continuing to refine the prompt and using it more frequently. Ultimately I would love to create a process of having it forecast and then tracking accuracy of the forecasts over time. Project for another day!

What the snow? AI Chatbots Predicting DC Weather!

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 05:00:35 +0000

Can AI Chatbots predict DC snow weather? I decided to try it out by letting ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini create a 7-day deeply researched forecast.

History Does Not Predict the Future

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:13:07 +0000

History is far less useful than many assume. It creates the illusion of predictability only once outcomes are already known.

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.

The Human Blind Spot Around Non-Deterministic Machines

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 15:35:50 +0000

Why LLM’s will always make mistakes and we shouldn’t call them hallucinations

I saw a tweet from Paul Graham a while back about how as LLMs become better their hallucinations will become more convincing. And it makes sense, a smart confident person saying something wrong often sounds more reliable than a less confident person saying the right thing timidly. Even more so, as you get good answers from the smart confident person you become more trustworthy and are less likely to question and double-check their future answers. That’s both a reality of and defect of human thinking.

Building a Simple Game or Why AI is the Future of Software Development

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 21:45:27 +0000

I’ve been using GitHub Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT to help me code for a couple of years now. But AI has always been in the assistant role – I was the one in the driver’s seat, asking technical questions or letting GitHub Copilot generate sections of code based on what I was writing. It makes you a more productive developer because it’s faster than Googling, but at the end of the day, I was still the one fundamentally coding, just with better tooling.

YamlDotNet, Interfaces, Lists, and Classes

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:29:09 +0000

How to deserialize and serialize a polymorphic list of interface types using YamlDotNet in .NET, with a reusable mapper class to avoid hardcoding interface and class names.

Power Platform CLI: Installing, Connecting, and Selecting an Organization

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 03:29:15 +0000

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.

Citizen Developers Have Always Existed

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 18:06:30 +0000

When IT leaders push back on “citizen development” they are just displaying their closed mindedness and incompetence. Every successful organization is - right now, today - full of citizen developers, people using whatever technology tools they have available (and often finding ways to get around IT limitations to get additional tools) to get their job done.

If you don’t enable your workforce to create solutions for themselves they will still find a way to create them. No organization has the budget to solve every use case with centralized IT. Workers don’t have a choice, they have a job to get done and they’ll get it done - with or without IT’s support or blessing.

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.

Setting Up a Power Apps Lab Environment (App in A Day / App in 60 minutes)

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 20:41:14 +0000

TL;DR: Need to configure a Microsoft Power Apps (Power Platform) Lab environment for a workshop, App in a Day, etc. here is a ready to go script: https://github.com/nicknow/Setup-DataverseLabEnvironment.

In the Microsoft Power App in a Day package there used to be a script to quickly deploy a trial environment. It would setup the users, environments, and databases so attendees could get right to work. Somewhere along the way that script was removed and the directions now include instructions for attendees to setup a trial or demo instance on their own.

The Importance of Moving Averages on COVID-19 Tracking Dashboards

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 01:06:54 +0000

I get annoyed with the way COVID-19 data is reported. There is a lot of emphasis put on the number today and on the aggregate (total cases, total deaths, etc.) These make good headline numbers but don’t do much to help people understand the current trend - are we getting better or worse.

So I built a report using the COVID-19 Tracking Project at The Atlantic’s data feed and Power BI for visualization. You can access the dashboard at bit.ly/NNCOVID19DB. The data is automatically updated several times daily.

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.

Carbon Neutral Supply Chains

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 15:18:00 +0000

This decade will see the rise of carbon-neutral supply chains which will impact businesses everywhere - even those far removed from serving tech firms in Silicon Valley. As more Fortune 500 companies join this trend carbon-neutral requirements will be pushed deep down the supply chain to the point that companies many layers deep in the supply chain will need to be carbon-neutral (or forgo significant business opportunities.)

Source: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsofts-plan-to-go-carbon-negative-raises-bar-for-tech-rivals?shared=a0ca6f346c3fb947

We’ll see the rise of auditing & certification for carbon-neutral suppliers. It won’t be much different than ISO quality standards for manufacturers with one HUGE exception: ISO standards only impacted the manufacturing and operations part of a business - the ISO registered plant only cared about ISO for raw material/part suppliers.

2020: Kubernetes, DevSecOps, and Cyber

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 15:01:00 +0000

2020 is going to be the year that Kubernetes (which really means containers) becomes fully ingrained in the enterprise. DevOps becomes the default model for building and deploying enterprise applications (full code, low code, and no code). Enterprise customers will increasingly want both custom apps and COTS products to fit to a Kubernetes and DevOps test/deployment/implementation model. Cybersecurity continues to grow and is a critical part of every conversation, it will be required that security is baked into every layer.

Why the Microsoft Power Platform is the No-Code Low-Code Platform You Need Now

Sat, 01 Sep 2018 05:53:13 +0000

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.

Oracle JEDI Contract Protest Filing

Thu, 09 Aug 2018 15:48:07 +0000

Protest filing by Oracle regarding the JEDI RFP issued by the Department of Defense.

Software giant Oracle is challenging the Pentagon’s decision to choose just one company for a not-yet-awarded $10 billion cloud computing contract, according to a bid protest document reviewed by The Washington Post, firing off a salvo in what is shaping up to be a heated competition among tech giants for one of the biggest government software contracts in years.

No Gogo: Gain Focus by Flying Without Internet

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 22:13:40 +0000

I used to have a monthly Gogo Wifi subscription. Then I got rid of it. Flying is better for me now, it’s more beneficial because it helps me to focus.

Not long ago I realized that Delta offered free wifi for messaging (iMessage, WhatsApp, etc.) Awesome. Now I can stay in contact but not get sucked into Apps and Internet world. I wish American offered this, but they don’t - so choose Delta if it’s an option.

Microsoft Business Applications (PowerApps/Dynamics 365) at Inspire 2018

Fri, 20 Jul 2018 17:48:23 +0000

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.

Microsoft Flow Dates Times Timezones and Formatting

Sun, 21 Jan 2018 06:04:49 +0000

This will be a quick post, but thought someone out there might find it useful if they are working in Microsoft Flow and need to get a local date and time and/or format a date and time.

This evening I was building a Flow. In this case it is a Flow that sends an email and I wanted to include the current date in the subject of the email (i.e., “Here are your work items for 01/21/2018”.) The expression design in Flow still seems odd to me - being that I primarily write C# code and a good bit of JavaScript.

Where to Get the Dynamics CRM SDK (Dynamics 365 SDK)

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 03:52:33 +0000

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.

Normality Is Not For The Future

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 15:30:45 +0000

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”

― Vincent van Gogh Too many people spend their time seeking normality and the false security it provides. In reality, normality is a front - it makes you think you are safe, while providing no safety net at all. For when you need a safety net, normality will leave you there unprepared and inexperienced to change direction, take the other fork in the road, challenge the status quo, or make change happen.

Drop the New Year’s Resolution try the January Resolution

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 16:57:52 +0000

If you don’t “do” New Year’s resolutions or they work for you or really for any other reason this doesn’t apply to you, please ignore it.

This year skip your New Year’s resolution and make a January 31-Day Resolution, you are much more likely to keep that resolution and positively impact your life. And make it a real resolution — something both measurable and achievable.

Cannot Measure vs Can Measure

You cannot measure success against “losing weight”, “eating healthier”, “drinking less”, “liking your job”, “being a better friend”, etc. You can measure “lose 5 pounds”, “don’t eat processed foods”, “no more than 3 drinks a week”, “apply to three jobs a week”, “call someone you haven’t talked to in 3 months each week” etc. If you cannot measure your goal you cannot know if you are achieving your goal — i.e., it will be just a crap shoot hoping for the outcome you desire.

Gender, Pay, and Promotion in the US Federal Workforce

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 18:40:45 +0000

Interesting original research by Maria Droganova on the historical differences in pay in the US Federal Government (civilian) workforce and how it is impacted by the gender of leadership.

I found the significant impact of supervisor gender to be most interesting. From a manager/leader side it is a strong indicator that unconscious bias is real, and we must actively manage against it in how we manage. From the worker side, it might indicate that you should target having a same-gender manager to maximize rewards. I find that in offices where all supervisors are men, male wages are on average 10.6% higher than female wages. In contrast, in offices where all supervisors are women, the wage gap in favor of men disappears and becomes 3.2% in favor of women due to a 7.1% increase in female wages and a 6.7% decline in male wages. Also, the gender of an executive (a higher level supervisor) has a lesser impact on wages than the gender of regular supervisors. However, the gender of an executive has a greater impact on wages of supervisors than on wages of non-supervisors, which is consistent with the theory of mentorship. On a personal note, I’ve not found this to be my experience. Having had significant time under both male and female direct managers. My experience is just anecdotal and anecdotal doesn’t mean much, always look to the research.

Dynamics 365: Calculating Next Anniversary/Birthday Date

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 05:14:55 +0000

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.

Deep Work: Stopping the Distractions Killing Your Performance

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 10:28:53 +0000

Since it is the start of December we’re now down to one month left to accomplish this year’s goals and set some goals for next year…for a lot of people those goals include getting some big projects done, and one of the reasons we fail to accomplish a lot of our big projects is because we aren’t in the right state to do deep work.

Deep Work

I only came across this NPR podcast (worth the 40 minutes to listen to) from July the other day and found it very interesting, in light of the need many of us have to find ways to be more effective. I see people complaining about their procrastination problem. (And no, you probably don’t have ADHD - not even “a little bit” - but if you think you legitimately might have ADHD then find a good psychiatrist and schedule an appointment.) Our world is becoming full of distractions and that is taking away from our ability to really focus and do deep work.

Hire Nice People To Build Effective Teams

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 11:12:53 +0000

I saw this tweet from the Tom Peters (@tom_peters), the management guru, the other day and it really struck a cord with me.

https://twitter.com/tom_peters/status/914155487595245569

I can’t say I always felt that way, there was a time I would have put “nice person” lower down on my criteria for hiring someone. My younger self would have said nice is nice but smarts are way smarter. I still believe smarts are important (as is drive, motivation, passion) but I have come to firmly believe nice matters a lot.

Why B2B and B2G firms Need Nordstrom Customer Service

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:09:16 +0000

Almost every B2C (Business to Consumer) organization knows that high-quality customer service is critical in today’s market. But many B2B (Business to Business) and B2G (Business to Government) firms fail to pay enough attention to customer service, this is a critical mistake.

The B2B/B2G customer is also a B2C customer and expects the same service from their business partners - technology partners, marketing firms, real estate, consultants, etc. - as they get at Nordstrom.

Dynamics CRM: Extensions to Improve IOrganizationService

Tue, 26 May 2015 22:42:41 +0000

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.

Dynamics CRM: FetchXML to Retrieve Access Team Members

Tue, 19 May 2015 22:56:12 +0000

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.)

Duplication Instead of Automation: Retailers Need Dynamics CRM

Wed, 08 Apr 2015 02:46:54 +0000

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.

Dynamics CRM and ILMerge: The Easy Way to Merge DLLs for Plugins

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 04:08:17 +0000

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.)

Uber Event/Complex Location Pickup

Sat, 07 Jun 2014 19:14:08 +0000

This is a product idea I have for Uber. I’m hopeful they will, one day, implement it.

Intent

Allow users to better understand and communicate pick-up locations at complex locations (stadiums, airports, conference centers, etc.) and special events (Super Bowl, Golf Tournament, etc.)

Reason

In many of these instances it is very difficult for a requestor to understand and communicate their location to the driver in a manner that is consistent with the vehicle pick-up regulations.

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: Custom Entity Forms Specific to Users

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 10:54:00 +0000

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.

Error 20000009 on Windows Update - Windows Server 2012

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 18:32:19 +0000

I was recently attempting to install SQL Server 2012 SP1 (KB2674319) via Windows Update on a VM. This is a Dev VM - specifically a new one I had built for working with SharePoint 2013 & CRM 2013. Nice new environment: Windows Server 2012, Visual Studio 2013, ReSharper 8, Dynamics CRM 2013, SharePoint 2013, and even Office 2013…heck 2013 is sounding like a great year!

Anyway, while letting Windows Update install SQL Server 2012 SP1 I kept getting the dread red install failure and an error 20000009. I did several searches but couldn’t find anything. I performed a repair on SQL Server 2012 using the install media - still no luck. It was only went I back that next day and tried to copy a large file that I received an out-of-space error.

Using LINQPad for Dynamics CRM Development

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:46:54 +0000

You are likely already familiar with the excellent development tool LINQPad and if you are a Dynamics CRM Developer you, hopefully, are familiar with LINQPad Plugin for Dynamics CRM. Using LINQPad along with the LINQPad CRM Plugin is a great way to learn the ins and outs of writing LINQ queries for Dynamics CRM.

In this article I will show you how, with just a minimal of effort, you can start using LINQPad to directly call Dynamics CRM. This will allow you to go beyond just building LINQ queries and execute code to test Request/Response messages, QueryExpression retrieval, FetchXml, and much more. Using LINQPad allows you to test and learn in real-time without waiting to compile your code and execute your test cases (if you even have test cases! You do have test cases, right?)

Dynamics CRM 2011: Prep Plug-in for XrmToolbox

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 12:53:00 +0000

Originally published at http://goo.gl/bkewP1 I can’t really take a lot of credit for this post. All of the difficult work was done by a couple of Dynamics gurus. XRM Prep Plug-in This is a plugin for XrmToolBox (http://xrmtoolbox.codeplex.com/) by Tanguy Touzard. Great thanks to Tanguy for releasing XrmToolBox and providing really solid documentation on how to create Plug-ins for it. XrmToolBox and his numerous other very useful Dynamics CRM tools, which all now run in XrmToolBox, are a great value to the Dynamics CRM community. The idea, implementation logic, and solution file that are the basis for this plug-in are the work of Marc Schweigert from Microsoft. His excellent blogging has been the source of great education for me about how to get the most out of Dynamics CRM. The XRM Starter solution file and the code were published by him in the blog post linked to below. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/devkeydet/archive/2013/01/22/getting-a-new-crm-2011-organization-ready-for-xrm.aspx You must install XrmToolBox on your machine to use this plug-in (http://xrmtoolbox.codeplex.com/). After installing XrmToolBox copy the Procetrnix.CleanForXRM.Dll file to the same directory that XrmToolBox.Exe is installed. Run XrmToolBox and you should see the XRM Prep listed as one of the modules under the Home tab. This plug-in is intended to be used against a new Dynamics CRM organization prior to making any customizations to prepare it for custom development, it can perform the following: - Install the XRM Starter solution file from Marc’s post. Hide the existing reports. Remove all the non-required security roles. Remove the standard dashboards. There are four checkboxes that allow you to select what all you want XRM Prep to handle for you. If you do not want the solution file to be imported you should uncheck Import Solution, etc. When you are ready click on Run in the toolbar at the top of the tab to run the process. You’ll see a status screen while the work is being done and a message box will inform you when it is completed. If you want a copy of the solution file you may download it from the link in Marc’s blog article (URL above) or you can click the Export XRM Solution File from the toolbar to export the file. The DLL exposes a public class, XrmSolutionSetup, that can be used by any .NET 4.0 code. XrmSolutionSetup has a method called Execute that expects to be used as the delegate for BackgroundWorker.DoWork. Thus, this code could be reused in another solution if you did not want to use XrmToolBox. One idea would be to implement this in a console application or PowerShell script that deployed and configured a new organization to start development. Here is the plug-in DLL: http://sdrv.ms/11pTAIn If you want to modify it for your own purposes or just see how it was implemented here is the source:http://sdrv.ms/11pTMaB No guarantees or anything…the source code is there so make it do what you want it to do. I hope this will help you speed up development work and inspire a couple people to make use of the great platform that Tanguy has given us with XrmToolbox.

Dynamics CRM 2011: Finally...Enterprise ALM for Dynamics CRM 2011

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:42:00 +0000

Originally published at http://goo.gl/XXm6z5 I wanted to bring your attention to two items that can be very useful for all of us working on Dynamics CRM. As you are aware, CRM customization and development has never really worked well with enterprise focused application lifecycle management (ALM.) The export capability (even with Solutions in 2011) has never worked very well with source code control and change management. In addition, scripting of builds and deployments for customizations have never been what I would call straight-forward or even possible. In the SDK released for Rollup 10 a Solution Packager command-line application that takes an exported solution file and breaks it up into its individual pieces. This combined with the command-line Solution Export tool in the MSCRM Toolkit provides the pieces necessary to automate CRM solutions in a system such as TFS or Git. (http://intovsts.net/2012/12/28/integration-of-dynamics-crm-2011-solutions-with-tfs/) Of course, the next request in enterprise development is automated deployment. As a holiday gift to the CRM world ADXStudio released a beta of their ADXStudio ALM Toolkit (http://community.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-alm-toolkit/) - licensing and pricing have not been announced so we’ll have to wait and see. This toolkit includes PowerShell Scriplets that allow for creating organizations and user and automated deployments of solutions, it includes a number of PowerShell scripts to demonstrate usage. It also includes a very valuable command-line tool to copy data from a source system to a file and then import the data during a deployment – this is especially useful for simplifying the process of loading configuration/base data during deployment. Taken together these tools provide the pieces necessary to fully automate the build and deployment process for Dynamics CRM. Many environments do not need this level of automation and the overhead for these tools has to be justified by the requirements. That said, for those environments where the needs justify the time/expense of full ALM it is good to know the requirements can be met with using pre-built tools.

Dynamics CRM 2011: Simplifying the Request Response Model

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 16:40:00 +0000

Originally published at http://goo.gl/C1n3Hw If you have worked with the Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK you are probably very familiar with the Request/Response model messages in Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Messages. As a developer trying to write good code I always want to wrap any service call in a Try/Catch statement to provide proper error handling. Another goal is to keep the code as neat as possible for when I – or someone else – has to go back and read it. Wrapping calls in Try/Catch statements increases the total lines of code it takes to implement functionality and makes the code more difficult to read. Recently I was working on a project where I had several of these calls in a row: Execute a request, process the response, build a new request, execute, etc. etc. While I was looking at the code I realized that my catch routine was basically the same (format a message for the user and exit out of the program – in addition to sending a number of execution details to the tracing service). Since the code was getting very long, my first thought was to refactor each of these calls into its own method. While this approach would make my code a bit cleaner, it was still somewhat limited in value. After thinking about the problem a bit more, I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to implement generics, extension methods, and delegates. If you are unfamiliar with any of these topics, here is a super quick introduction: - Generics allow us to create a method without having to know all the input types or the response type thus allowing the developer to specify them when calling the method. Extension methods allow us to create static methods against an existing class without having to inherit to a new class thus we do not disturb any code already relying on the class we want to extend. Delegates let us take a method (that matches the specified signature) and pass it as a variable. You can find out more about each of these concepts in the MSDN documentation links provided. Before we get too far into the details we should review the issue we are trying to resolve. Here is a very basic CRM plug-in that executes a WhoAmI request and gets a WhoAmI response. As I count it there are 6 statements with the try/catch but not including the PluginSetup (see my previous post athttp://goo.gl/lEaa9), to complete the request. It may not seem like a lot, but in the real-world those calls also have logging and the request probably has actual properties that need to be set. No matter what request message you use the basic pattern will remain the same. public void Execute(IServiceProvider serviceProvider) { var p = new PluginSetup(serviceProvider); var req = new WhoAmIRequest(); WhoAmIResponse response = (WhoAmIResponse)p.Service.Execute(req);

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.

Dynamics CRM 2011: Check Team Membership

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 17:08:28 +0000

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

The team in Dynamics CRM 2011 provides an ability to group users, assign record ownership to a group of users, and extend security roles to users based on their team membership (as opposed to individually assigning the role.)

Teams in Dynamics CRM 2011: A team is a group of users. This organizational structure enables groups of users across an organization to share information. Each team must be associated with only one business unit. A team can include users from any business unit, not only the business unit with which the team is associated. Users can be associated with more than one team. More details can be found in the Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK Documentation. Beyond allowing cross-business unit record access and assignment of security roles, the Team entity can provide a simple way to create a group of users.