April 2013 – xRM Coaches

1 CRM Upgrade Note: Check your URL References

I ran into an unexpected situation during an upgrade that quite honestly, left me a bit baffled. It seems a breaking change was introduced during the CRM 2011 upgrade process. Some Background In CRM 4.0, you could open an Entity record with either one of the following URLs: http://crm2011/Contoso/userdefined/edit.aspx?id=%7bE50B1A7B-1AA2-E211-953E-00155D200507%7d&etn=new_entity http://crm2011/Contoso/userdefined/edit.aspx?id=%7bE50B1A7B-1AA2-E211-953E-00155D200507%7d&etc=10010 The difference being using […]

0 Contacting Your Customer: The Good and The Bad

I wanted to show you two examples of contact with a customer. In my opinion, one is good, and one is bad. You may decide for yourself. The Bad My wife received this from her optometrist: Besides a little redaction of the doctor’s details, this is untouched. I see two problems here: 1. My […]

1 Dynamics CRM development and the new auto-save feature

The Dynamics CRM 2011 December 2012 service update (otherwise code-named Polaris) gave us the new Flow-UI forms. These forms include an auto-save feature that can, and probably will, effect the way we CRM developers approach our work. If you have not investigated the side-effects and other design-considerations for this new feature, please take a look […]

0 Changes to IFRAME Properties

In Dynamics CRM 4.0, the Label property of an IFRAME was not required: With Dynamics CRM 2011, the Label property is required: This is not a problem until you attempt to edit the properties of an IFRAME. If the Label is blank, you will receive and error and be forced to complete the […]

1 Worst-Ever Mobile Login Design Experience

This has to be the worst design of any mobile application that I use: Do you see the big blue button? Would it not seem that since it is the largest on the screen, it is the most important and/or most powerful? Uh, no. It is the most infuriating. Pressing that button will erase […]

2 Upgrade Your URL Parameter References

There are times when working in either JavaScript or .NET where you need to either display a CRM record or give the user the option of clicking a link to display a CRM record. The CRM 2011 SDK documents this process here: Open Forms, Views, Dialogs and Reports with a URL? It also includes a […]

1 CRM SDK Nugget: Entity.ToEntityReference Method

Here is another cool Entity extension method that I keep forgetting to use: Entity.ToEntityReference. Normally, when creating a reference to an Entity, we would use something like this: RetrieveRequest request2 = new RetrieveRequest { Target = new EntityReference(Account.EntityLogicalName, account2.Id), ColumnSet = new ColumnSet(), RelatedEntitiesQuery = new RelationshipQueryCollection() }; However, if we have already gone to […]

3 Heads up: Get ready to upgrade your CRM 4.0 .Net code

There has been a some coverage of the upcoming version of the next version of Dynamics CRM, currently code-named Orion, and the changes that will need to be made prior to the upgrade. Here are a couple: Permalink to CRM 4 Support- End of the Line! Time to Upgrade Folks! or fall 2 versions behind! […]

3 Visual Studio Tip O’ the Day: Delete your test results

You may not realize it, but Visual Studio keeps the runs of your unit tests for a long time, if not forever. I was cleaning up my hard drive today when I noticed one of my development folders was huge. I turns out I had 300MB and 2,300 files as a result of running my […]

1 Dynamics CRM Topics of Interest (April 19th)

I thought I’d share a few things of interest in the Dynamics CRM world that I’ve seen in the past few weeks: Christopher Cognetta has a great recap of Convergence 2013 here: Convergence 2013 Recap: Review by a CRM MVP Demian Rasko has written a tool to bulk create test data. I have not tried […]

2 CRM SDK Nugget: Entity.FormattedValues Property

When working with the Dynamics CRM SDK, I think we may all overlook a very handy property that can save us a lot of time:Tthe FormattedValues property. It contains values formatted in the human-readable version of field types such as: Option Sets (including State and Status Reason fields) Dates Currency Two-options Here is an example […]

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Monthly Archives: April 2013