Living In Tech

Recently while creating a plugin for Dynamics 365 v9, I ran into an issue trying to connect to CRM via the tooling connector in my unit test project.  The underlying problem was that the .NET version I was using in my unit test was 4.5.2.  This was preventing me from being able to connect to CRM to create my organization service.  I updated the .NET version on my unit test project to 4.6.1 and was then finally able to connect.  I will also add that I am using the latest nuget package version for Dynamics 365 v9.

For consistence, I updated the plugin project I was working on to .NET 4.6.1.  Locally, everything was working great.  I was able to connect to CRM and make sure that all the methods I had written did what they where suppose to do using test driven development practices.

Then when publishing my plugin via the latest version of the plugin registration tool, I received an error and could not publish my plugin.  The error was due to the .NET version of my plugin project not bein…

Recently I had a requirement where I needed to get related records via a many-to-many (N:N) relationship in Dynamics 365 via a plugin in C#.  During my searching online, I kept coming to posts that involved using query expressions.  I wanted to do this with LINQ for consistence reasons and readability in my code.  I will also add that what I was doing was being done via Associate and Disassociate messages of the plugin.  I won't be reviewing that part of the plugin in this post, but I will just be focusing on the LINQ statement used to get the related records via the N:N relationship.  Here is the example code that I came up with:

public List<Entity> GetRelatedRecords(Guid parentID, IOrganizationService service) { OrganizationServiceContext context = new OrganizationServiceContext(service); List<Entity> oProducts = (from r in context.CreateQuery(RELATIONSHIP_NAME) join eOne in context.CreateQuery(ENTITY_ONE_LOGI…

On June 6th, 2018 Scribe Software was acquired by TIBCO.  Below is the announcement I and other partners received in an e-mail with links to the press release.

"We are pleased to announce that on June 6, Scribe Software was acquired by TIBCO Software. This milestone reflects the increasing strategic importance that Scribe’s product line has with IT organizations and presents great opportunities for Scribe’s partner community.

In the short term, there will be no immediate impact to how you conduct business with Scribe. Your sales and support contacts will all remain the same. Over time, we expect that the combination of Scribe’s best-in-class iPaaS with TIBCO’s enterprise product portfolio, which includes messaging, application integration, API management, and analytics offerings, will provide significant capabilities and opportunities for Scribe’s partner community.

To learn more about the opportunities that lay ahead, read the press release..."

Scribe has made it extremely easy to work with their API.  Currently, in my limited free time, I am working on a reusable C# library to send and receive data from Scribe's API.  Once it is completed for Version 1, I will list it to GitHub, so anyone can consume it and provide feedback on improvements.  There will be a fully built out wiki with how to consume the library with references to the Scribe API documentation.  Also there will be both TDD (Test Driven Development) and BDD (Behavior Driven Development) projects.  This way you can see examples of how to consume the library as well as what I tested before release.  If you are not familiar with BDD, I recommend you check out my blog post in my Dynamics 365 blog, that gives a high level overview of it.

Anyways, back to what this post is about.  While working on the library, I came across one small issue around TLS 1.2 and making sure that the web request uses it.  Luckily, this is really easy to set in C#, when using .NET 4.5. …

When we are designing a new system, one of the tools we use is user stories.  User stories allow us to define what the feature should do from the view point of the end user.  This way we take a user centered approach to designing the system.  These are also used as part of our functional testing when writing code (plugin, JavaScript, etc.) to make sure what was written matches the user story.  Even if we use Test Driven Development (TDD) we could easily miss some of the key functions within the feature and need to go back to our code to make changes and then restart our testing process.  This can be time consuming.  Wouldn't it be better to start our testing off with the user story?

With advancements in frameworks and technology we now have the capability to write test scripts directly from the user story using SpecFlow.  Taking this approach is known as Behavior Driven Development (BDD) because we are testing the users interactions instead of just data and functions.  This become…

On April 6th, 2018 Scribe released an update to SCRIBE Online.  You can read all the details of the changes here.  In this post about the update, I want to go over some of the stuff I have seen while working with this new update, and it's an AMAZING update to the platform.  Here are my highlights:

Performance - There does appear to be improvement to how well the platform functions in Chrome (Chrome is my primary browser).  Previously, I did have some performance issues in Chrome and on larger map's I would have to dump my cache or exit chrome and re-launch to speed it back up again (not always the case, but did need done from time to rime).  This appears to be eliminated for me.  I can clearly see marked improvements when it comes to lag and performance. *See bullet point 4 under Platform which is under Enhancements.Agent Request Logs - Users now have the ability to request the logs from the agent without logging into the server where the agent is installed to get them.  Simple…