I had a problem with a piece of software I wrote quite a long time ago, when it was first implemented and data volumes were low it worked fine, but as recently the volume of data it is expected to process has grown beyond all expectations, it was time to revisit the code to see […]
Most people seem to use external libraries when decoding JSON returned from web services or other external functions but in .Net .45 there is a native library that works extremely well for most JSON string returned by external services. The functions are included in the System.Web.Helpers library and this must be included for this to […]
I had a client ring me in a bit of a panic as their CRM system had upgraded to V9 over the weekend and the forms integration I had built for them ages ago had stopped working. They kept getting a ‘Connection forcibly closed’ error every time they tried to submit a form. Fortunately I […]
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 […]