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.

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xRM Portals Community Edition to Dynamics 365 Portals migration preparedness

Dynamics 365 Portals is receiving regular updates from Microsoft, and as the product evolves it has changes which include new features as well as the deprecation and future removal of features.

One of the stated objectives for the open source xRM Portals Community Edition project is to enable a migration path to the Microsoft hosted service. To be prepared for this eventual migration, it’s helpful to know what changes are occuring in Dynamics 365 Portals now that will affect such a migration, so that proactive decisions and actions can be taken in advance and make a future migration as smooth a process as possible.

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xRM Portals CE now using StyleCopAnalyzers

When Microsoft released the Dynamics 365 Portals source code, one of the additions they’d made to the codebase was to use StyleCop, a tool to assist in automatically analyzing C# code for the adherence of coding style rules. StyleCop rules are run during build of a project, and rule violations are reported in the Visual Studio output and error list windows based on configurable settings, such as being reported as compilation errors, warnings, or simply informational. With a set of rules in place, a codebase can be kept to a consistent coding style standard by encouraging or forcing them to be followed.

It became apparent that StyleCop wasn’t running consistently for developers after an issue was opened to report a StyleCop rule violation. It may have been a simple configuration issue on my part, but after several failed attempts at trying to setup several Visual Studio installations to run StyleCop, I decided it would be easier and better to switch the codebase over to using a newer and recommended replacement for StyleCop, called StyleCopAnalyzers.

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xRM Portals CE planned compatibility for Dynamics 365 CE July 2017 Update

Microsoft has started sending out emails to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement customers to announce upcoming changes in the July 2017 Update and how the security of network connections is changing. The change is the version of the transport layer security, TLS, is changing to require a minimum of version 1.2, and not accept lower protocol versions anymore, including TLS 1.1 and 1.0. This requires changes to xRM Portals Community Edition (CE) to ensure compatibility.

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Project ideas for xRM Portals CE

The first week of xRM Portals Community Edition has come and gone, and I’ve been thinking of some next steps to take with the project to make it useful and relevant to those who would like to use and/or contribute to it. GitHub has a projects feature where you can keep track of plans and tasks outside of issues, and I’ve added an initial first set of efforts I’d like to see happen.

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Early days for xRM Portals Community Edition

I had the priviledge of performing the first commit of xRM Portals Community Edition to GitHub shortly after the one-time code drop by Microsoft, and within a few short days it’s exciting to see this project taking on a life of its own. The biggest surprise so far has been the small but notable number of people that have starred, watched, and forked the project, showing that there’s genuine interest in it.

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