The web interface for reviewing pull requests in Azure DevOps has two user interfaces for comparing files. If you’re not aware or careful while reviewing the files you could be unintentionally allowing undesirable changes to get introduced.
Alan
Email Setup for Dynamics 365 Queues using IMAP/SMTP
Sending and receiving emails from Dynamics 365 has always been something I’ve found to be a challenge to setup. I recently wanted to have emails sent to an email address get saved to Dynamics 365 as email activities, and for replies to those emails to be sent from within Dynamics 365. A typical scenario for this is a help desk or call center that uses a single email address for sending and receiving all emails. I was able to accomplish this using a Dynamics 365 queue, and to help demystify and remember how to perform this task I’ve documented the steps to follow.
The end of xRM Portals Community Edition
As 2020 comes to an end, so does xRM Portals Community Edition. On December 19th, 2020, I marked the GitHub project as archived, so that everything would become read-only, including the code, wiki, and issue management features.
I was a little hesitant to take this step because of my personal connection to the code, my career, and all the unsung developers that worked tirelessly to build it from its inception at Adxstudio all the way until its acquisition and one-time release by Microsoft. Nostalgia aside, I feel it was the right time, given the ever-increasing inactivity on the project and my judgement of it having accomplished the project’s goal of providing a migration path to Microsoft’s online portals service.
What follows is my retrospective of the project.
Blog posts I’ve lost to the ethers of time
The web is an ephemeral medium, if you’re not careful. Throughout my career, I’ve written blog posts for the company I’ve worked for. Over time, those websites or their content have been removed, and before their removal I copied the posts to my personal blog to keep a record of what I’d written.
But alas, I missed two blog posts I wrote in 2014 working at Adxstudio and can’t find a copy of them. They were, admittedly, not very high quality content, and from what I can tell they were removed from the site within a few months by someone who must have thought they weren’t good enough to stay published!
Announcing the CrmDataPackager PowerShell module
I’ve released a new PowerShell module, CrmDataPackager, that lets you unpack Configuration Migration data zip files into separate files per record, m2m relationship, and even individual fields.
This module’s commands help you achieve ALM for your Dynamics 365 / Dataverse / Power Apps / CDS / CRM data. The commands included are Expand-CrmData and Compress-CrmData, which are analogous to the pack and unpack operations of Solution Packager, but used for configuration data.
Unexpected privilege error when linking knowledge article to case
My team recently encountered an error in Dynamics 365, and I thought it would be interesting to share the solution. Thanks to Microsoft support for providing an explanation.
We had created a custom security role with restricted privileges that could not create knowledge articles, and a user assigned to this security role would get an error trying to link a knowledge article to a case.