This blog post is going to be an introductory description of how to add and customize the sample scripts from the Adoxio.Dynamics.DevOps project into your own source controlled project so that you can start to perform scripted exports and imports of solutions and data in Dynamics 365.
Useful WordPress Plugins
I’ve been using WordPress for my personal blogging for just over a year now, and over this time period have found and installed a collection of plugins to customize WordPress to my liking. This post describes the plugins I’ve installed to get my blog working just right.
How to work, 6 years ago
I wrote these personal notes almost 6 years ago in a document I’d titled How to work at Adxstudio. At the time, I had left Adxstudio and was working at CGI, and while away from the company and having had enough time to get some perspective, I was able to reach a deeply introspective mindset and started considering going to work at Adxstudio again. To help myself with the decision making process, I put into words what I thought was the best way to be an effective employee at Adxstudio based on my experience having worked on the services team that implemented projects for clients for 8.5 years, and the different experiences I was having working as a consultant at CGI.
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.
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.
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.