With the release of the new version of the Crm2016/Dynamics365 SDK the recommended method to connect to CRM in code has changed. Originally it was (although other methods were available with connection strings) With the advent of the tooling connector dll and the other changes in the api this should now be changed to: The […]
Consider this scenario although I will stress that it is strictly hypothetical as it would be completely stupid to never take any backups, and everybody has a good backup strategy in place especially for portable devices. While you are configuring the CRM system you have a consultant who has a CRM virtual machine on his […]
The first function that springs to mind is the RAND() function, but this suffers from a few drawbacks. Firstly it is only a pseudo random number and it generates values between 0 and 1. This is easily rectified by multiplying the result by the range you want, so for values between 0 and 255 the […]
SQL Server is excellent for storing data and passing it back in nice ordered blocks, but what happens if you just want to take a random selection of data for example a random list of customers to test a new marketing campaign on. Since SQL2005 there has been a clause called TABLESAMPLE that will allow […]
Following on from my last post about a random number generator in SQL, another method of providing a random number generator would be to add the function using C# and the Common Language Runtime, and fortunately the tools to do this are now installed with SQL Server. We could do this using Visual Studio but […]
Recently needing to provide the ability to create a N:N relationship in a workflow process provided an excuse to create a quick workflow plugin as unfortunately it isn’t currently possible to do it out-of-the-box if you have defined a relationship rather than using an intersect table. Fortunately a plugin to do this is a very […]
One of the things that often catch the unwary especially when they develop in the UK during the winter (i.e. not when daylight saving time is in operation) is that the dates look fine that the retrieve in code from CRM, but suddenly when the clocks go forward their users report issues that appointments are […]
Marketing lists come in two flavours, static which are a simple list of contacts, accounts or leads and dynamic which are represented by a single query rather than by attaching each record to the list separately. This means if you need to access this information programmatically you have to include an extra step to make […]
Every so often when you are reading a record in code the integer values from the OptionSet fields arent enough because you want to display the whole of the data contained in the record and make it fit for user consumption. Unfortunately the only way is to pull out the OptionSet values from the fields […]
Imagine the scenario where you have a plugin that executes when an entity is updated. We will call this entity A, and the plugin updates entity B. Not usually a problem, but to make things more interesting we have a plugin on entity B that fires an update back to entity A. This then tries […]