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Showing posts from November, 2009

Tools Update : New connection control

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Hi everybody, Following a user request, I added a new connection control in all my tools, which allows to save and load connections configuration from/to a configuration file. This file is used by all the tools. Here is the connection control The password request form (as passwords are not stored in the configuration file) And actually, the form which allows to select one of the existing connections configuration. It is used when an action requires an active connection to a CRM Server. In order to help you to download all updated tools, I created an archive containing all tools.

Who customize what and when?

The customization feature of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is well known for being one of its best strengths. However, it lacks one essential feature nearly: The monitoring of theses customizations. Indeed, it is impossible to know who does what in terms of customization and above what customizations were published. With plugins and the famous capabilities of customization, it is relatively simple to set up an event log of customizations in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. What you need is Plugins and one Custom Entity (let say “Customization Log”) Plugins Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides us with several messages that allow us to track what is happening in terms of customizations the application. There are two types of messages: Import Messages Publish Messages Import Messages They can give you two pieces of information: The customization file that was imported (CompressedCustomizationXml property) The entities or parameters that have been imported (ParameterXml property) The messages are:

Custom web application and bin folder... Yes, but...

As you can see on the Best Practice of the CRM SDK (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd548493.aspx), since rollup 2, you can put your custom assembly to your own web application bin folder instead of using the bin folder of the CRM web application. Since a while, I didn't understand why this practice seemed to work for everybody except me... The answer is simple: The assembly name can't contain any dot if you want it to work... It is a known bug by Microsoft. As I was used to name my assemblies like .Crm.Web, it couldn't work... I hope this will help some of you, guys!