49 Results from 73 Posts
Over time I have been keeping a list of build numbers. Here is the latest list of Microsoft CRM 4.0 build numbers for those that are keeping score at home. Build Number Released Details 4.0.7333.2542 12/17/2009 Rollup Update #8 4.0.7333.2138 11/5/2009 Rollup Update #7 4.0.7333.1750 8/26/2009 Rollup Update #6 4.0.7333.1644 7/2/2009 Rollup Update #5 4.0.7333.1551 5/7/2009 Rollup Update #4
I was recently asked what the .data property is on a client-side CRM PartyList Item. The SDK has this to say “Any other data. Optional for set.” That of course is not much help. If we dig a bit deeper into the code we find that the Lookup data property is rarely used. In fact 98% of the time it is blindly copied about and rarely if ever parsed. So what is it used for? My memory is hazy as to why we added this one upon a time, but I vaguely recall it was added for special cases where we just needed a nip of “data” to be preserved. One of those cases is with the R
This one slipped past me the first I reviewed the Rollup Update 8 fix list. You try to use Deployment Manager to import an organization to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. However, the Import Organization Wizard takes a long time to import the organization. 977867 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977867/) The Import Organization Wizard takes a long time to import an organization in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 By a “long time” they mean “Up to 10 minutes per user”. The following log gives you an idea: 17:29:00|Verbose| Adding new account {0}| ASCEN
Microsoft quietly snuck this one in there, but recent versions of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK License Terms grant wide and more reasonable rights to use the SDK. This was very nice of Microsoft and really just clarifies and solidifies what the field, partners and customers were doing anyway. The new terms can be found in the file licenseterms.doc which is a part of the SDK. The key change is an addition of a new section which is as follows: 2. ADDITIONAL LICENSING REQUIREMENTS AND/OR USE RIGHTS. a. Distributable Code. The software contains co
Since the release Microsoft CRM 4.0, the logic of how the system configures internal URLs has been cloudy at best and limited at worse. Fortunately based on customer feedback and a very responsive Sustained Engineering Team at Microsoft, the capabilities of this logic have been expanded. The importance of this is to enable CRM to work in more and more environments. Have a web server that doesn’t respond to “localhost”? No problem use a new registry key. Have web servers that HTTP but a load balancer that offloads and processes HTTPS? No problem, use a new re
I just learned this little nugget of goodness from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance Toolkit. If you want to quickly create 200 AD users for data migrations, Organization imports or performance testing you can simply us the NET USER command like so: for /L %i in (1,1,200) do net user CrmTestUser%i p@ss1word /ADD /domain This says, create 200 domain users with the name CrmTestUser(1-200) with the password of “p@ss1word”. Digging deeper, there are more options so you can get a bit fancier. This version adds a description, full name and prevents the user from changi
After installing KB956391 and some later IE hot fixes, users that try to print reports in CRM (or any SSRS report) will get an error that says they are “Unable to load the client print control”. The reason for this is that the original ActiveX control that shipped with SSRS 2000 / 2005 and 2008 had a pretty dangerous GDI+ bug in it. Microsoft later issued a “Kill Bit” to disable this control from loading any more and thus the error “unable to load client print control”. The fix is to update your SSRS server with a fixed version of the ActiveX control, so users can download an
Its been a while time since my last post, I have been busy playing with a bunch of beta bits from Microsoft and building great XRM solutions on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Recently I noticed that a few of our developers were in the habit of defaulting the URLs of custom CRM Form IFRAMEs to “about:blank” and then programmatically setting the URL using Java Script based on some business rules. This approach makes perfect sense when the URL must be calculated and the “about:blank” has the slight performance benefit of not making any unneeded requests to the server. This is actually
Well, it’s about time. :-) I have been asking for this feature since Microsoft CRM 3.0 and it appears they have finally gotten it right. Hurray! Here is the About Box for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Rollup Update #3: Notice the version number is still the RTM number (4.0.7333.3) Now, here is the About Box for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Rollup Update #4: Notice how the version number is actually updated to reflect the version you have installed! And there was much rejoicing… Cheers,
Cross-Posting from http://blogs.msdn.com/crm As I discussed in my previous post, I had the opportunity to volunteer as a CRM Solution Architect for Microsoft’s 2nd Incubation Week. While there, I prototyped a Silverlight 3.0 viewer control that could bind directly to images stored in Microsoft Dynamics CRM as attachments. Now this is not the first sample of Silverlight working with CRM, but I think this is the first one that I can find that binds to attachments; it also has a custom shader that allows you to control the brightness, contrast and negative of the image. :-) To use this sampl
A little while back, I posted about issues with IE6 and Microsoft CRM. These issues really have to more with IE6 than with CRM as there are simply a load of bugs in the browser that would cause any high-end web application to have problems. You can read my previous post here: http://www.ascentium.com/blog/crm/Post520.aspx I wanted to update this post and call out two important notes. The first is that IE6 “issues” don’t always appear as partially rendered pages. They also appear as frozen screens, random lockups, slow performance and plan old crashes. These are
I received a request the other day for an updated list of CRM 3.0 Build Numbers, so here it is: Build Number Released Details 3.0.5300.0 October 2005 This is the RTM release 3.0.5300.1185 - 3.0.5300.1189 July 2006 Rollup Update #1 Fork This actually started in July of 2006 and was released in November 2006 3.
Last week, I had the privilege of being a Solution Advisor for Microsoft’s 2nd Dynamics CRM Incubation Week in Boston. For those not familiar with this event, it is a week where Microsoft invites a few startups to a Microsoft Technology Center to meet with marketing experts, venture capitalists and top technical talent to help rapidly “spark" a new business venture. The event also introduces these startups to BizSpark, which is a awesome licensing program Microsoft provides for startups.
I will say, if a friend of mine was starting a new technology product venture tomorr
It has been a long time since I have posted a nice juicy hack to CRM, but I have a good one for today. For developers out there that have been happily coding plug-ins for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 and have had the desire to also write plug-ins that fire when you Associate or Disassociate entities via a many-to-many (N:N) relationship; this hack is for you. First let’s talk about the feature. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 added a new “Many to Many” relationship type that allows you to associate one entity to another multiple times and vice versa. This relationship type also existed in CRM
For those of you still using Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 or SP2 and are trying to make use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, you should be aware of a rendering issue that IE 6 has. The issue results in pages that appear partially rendered and may look something like this:
Besides the 8-bit color rendering, you can obviously see that the page looks a bit off. The reason for this is that the dynamically generated style sheets that CRM produces from pages like global.css.aspx are not rendering correctly.
Here are some of the known issues: Internet Explorer do
For those of us that like to push CRM to the limits, we often find the need to “hack” or modify some of CRM’s files. In CRM 3.0, when rollup updates came out… the rollup would simply overwrite your files. This was both a blessing and a curse. It was good because it made it very obvious what files you needed to “fix” to keep your custom solution working… it was bad because it would instantly break your stuff if you modified one of these updated files. In CRM 4.0, the rollups no longer overwrite files that you have changed. This is great because the odds of a rollup brea
Here is the latest list of Microsoft CRM 4.0 build numbers for those that are keeping score at home. Build Number Released Details 4.0.7333.1316 2/8/2009 Rollup Update #2 (Re-Release) 4.0.7333.1312 1/15/2009 Rollup Update #2 (Original Release) 4.0.7333.1113 11/24/2008 Rollup Update #1 4.0.7333.3 12/19/2007 RTM 4.0.7333.2 December 2007 RC2 (Internal) 4.0.7309.0 November 2007 RC0
Today’s post comes from our very own Scott Jung. Enjoy… After some discussion with Microsoft, there is a known issue that is essentially created in Rollup1, partially fixed in 2 hotfixes (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954433/) (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949564/) that are part of Rollup 2, but still occurs when the following conditions are true: Advanced Find is started More than one condition is set One of the Conditions is a Date field That Date condition is used in a GROUP AND or GROUP OR with another condition My research is that I can run the query o
I recently has the opportunity to write an article for TechNet Magazine and I am very happy to say it is now in print and online for all to enjoy. This is my first published article, so this is obviously rather exciting. Here is the article:
Deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
Aaron Elder
If you're used to thinking of CRM as just a sales and marketing management tool, think again. Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management is a platform for developing applications that manage and track information and processes related to real-world objects. Th
This post is also available here. Recently, we had the need to delete several attributes from an entity we had created (Employee). Normally this is a very straight forward affair in Microsoft CRM. You simply remove the field from the Form and Grids and they using the Entity Editor select the attribute and hit “delete”. In this case, the attributes in question, were being used by workflow. Unfortunately, the error you get from CRM is not terribly helpful: While the steps to take are indeed correct and actually rather useful, the error does nothing to tell you which Workflow is causing the p
Recently, we recently had a power failure at one of our data centers which for a few reasons resulted in a hard shutdown of our CRM Server. After the power came back on, the server started normally and everything seemed to be working well. Normally that is, with the exception of the Microsoft CRM Email Router service, which failed to start. The failure error was rather useful and the fix was rather easy. Here is the error:
The E-mail Router service could not run the service main background thread. The E-mail Router service cannot continue and will now shut dow
While be snowed this weekend, I had a chance to build an environment and test CRM 4.0 out on a Windows Server 2008 with SQL Server 2008. I followed the instructions in this KB article and installed the recommended Server Roles. I then ran setup, ran “Auto Update” and used all the typical installation options. The system installed without a hitch and after preliminary testing is working just fine.
CRM 4.0 Running Just Fine
Server Roles
I later ran Rollup Update #1 and ran into one small issue, it appears
For those not paying much attention, here are a few recent updates in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM world that you may have missed over the last week: As Ross has pointed out… Microsoft has released Rollup Update #1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. This is very exciting as there have long been a number of hot fixes available that the majority of our customers have required. This little package puts them all in one place. The build number of this update is 4.0.7333.1113 which appears to be the same build number of a Rollup beta that was released a little over a month a
Since those 80+ hour weeks when Jason Hunt, myself and others were slaving away building CRM 1.x and 3.x and saying to ourselves that ‘what we were building could easily be an application development platform’. The idea of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as an application development platform has really taken off and the merits of this are truer today than ever. Recently, Microsoft announced “CRM Incubation Week” as part of Microsoft BizSpark. This is an opportunity to work onsite at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Reston, VA to rapid prototype solutions on the Dynamics CRM Platfo
Sunday 11/2/2008 10:05 PM by Aaron Elder
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One thing that continuously seems to be a problem for CRM 4.0 customizers is the fact that things just don’t seem to work right when you create custom Roles and try to grant access to particular “scenarios”. The reasons for this are two fold:
The Microsoft CRM privilege model is complex and the exact combination of privileges to perform a particular action are NOT well documented. This is probably the single biggest cause of frustration for customizers and users alike. Because of the complexity and the lack of “scenario based” documentation, it is rarely obvious what privileges
Recently while giving some CRM 4.0 training, one of our Business Intelligence developers ask me “Since the SRS Report Viewer Control portion of SRS is installed on the CRM server, how is this control updated when SRS updates are released?”. While, I have given this training many times, nobody to date had asked this question and didn't have a very good answer to give. So I did some research and here is the answer.
First off, the Report Viewer Control does not actually ship with Microsoft CRM 4.0 and instead it is separate prerequisite that the CRM setup will download as needed.
A while back, Jason Hunt took some time to create a simple CRM Logo GIF that could be used for AJAX operations. We finally got around to updating it for CRM 4.0 and I figured I would share it with the world.
Enjoy,
Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Another great update to the Microsoft CRM 4.0 SDK. This update was actually released on October 1st, 2008: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82E632A7-FAF9-41E0-8EC1-A2662AAE9DFB&displaylang=en Release New and updated topics Description of changes Version 4.0.7 September 2008 Added documentation for bug 35907. importjob Class Added new reference topics that describe importjob class and the class properties. Import Job Entity Capabilities Added a new topic describing the capabilities of import job entity. Using the Import Job Entity
I am happy to say that Microsoft has finally released an updated version of the Microsoft CRM 4.0 BizTalk 2006 adapter. A working adapter has been available for some time, but it was really just a patch and actually worked against the old web service endpoint even on CRM 4.0. The new adapter is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=abd3bb9e-a59a-4eb6-8de8-fb25b77926d7&DisplayLang=en Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2006 Adapter for Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0 enables integration between Microsoft Dynamics CRM and non-Microsoft business applications.
A month or so back, I was having lunch with the SDK documentation team and they asked me “does anyone really use the helpers?” to which, I responded “absolutely”, I then proceeded to agree to writing a blog post on the topic and that is the basis for today’s post.
First off, what are the “helpers” and why do so few people seem to know about them? They have been in the SDK for quite some time and they are not very hard to use. I think the problem is that people may not know how to put them to good use on their projects.
I think the first thing to do is to explain what the helpers ar
It's been a year since Invoke Systems and Ascentium merged and we finally took down the old clunk server that was hosting the old Invoke Systems blog. This blog is of course still getting lots of hits and due to popular demand, I am going to migrate a few choice posts on our current blog. Note these posts are all related to Microsoft CRM 3.0. Here is the first. The other day I was doing a bit of testing to find the fastest way to make rapid calls to CRM Web Services. The truth of the matter is that when you are calling CRM Web Services you are pretty much down to the m
I have recently been working on a project that has a very large customization file (VLCF) with over 60 entities and hundreds of custom attributes in it. On a clean virtual CRM environment, the time it takes to do a full clean import (vanilla CRM database, full import, full publish) of these customizations can take a very long time. Recently, I have turned my attention to trying to improve the day-to-day lives of developers that have to sit around and wait as CRM chugs along on this file. I am working on some deep tweaks that in preliminary tests are improving import speeds
A while back I posted about the differences between a vanilla Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installation vs. a system that was upgraded from CRM 3.0 to CRM 4.0. During my testing, I noticed one issue regarding an error when importing “upgraded” customizations into a vanilla system. The error had to do with Bulk Operation entity. Failure: bulkoperation: Invalid argument. Microsoft appears to have since released a hotfix for this issue. You can get and read about the hotfix here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948588/EN-US/ The cause, according to the KB art
Over the weekend the CRM SDK team released an updated version of the CRM 4.0 SDK. The new version is 4.0.5 and was released on May 30th, 2008. You can get the new version here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82e632a7-faf9-41e0-8ec1-a2662aae9dfb&DisplayLang=en Here is a list of what has changed: Affected Files Change SDK\Readme.htm Updated readme file with late-breaking information. Also, changed the product name throughout the documentation to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. SDK\Bin\
Many companies prefer to run applications as a service account instead of as a built-in account like NETWORK SERVICE. While each approach has its own distinct benefits, this article provides some additional steps, tips and things to verify if you want to do the installation as a service account.
First, be aware that when you as setup to install CRM as a service account, the Environment Diagnostic Wizard will give you the following warning: "Verify Domain User account SPN for the Microsoft Dynamics CRM ASP.NET Application Pool account."
This is safe to ignor
As you may or may not know, when a user deletes a record in Microsoft CRM via the UI or SDK, the record is not actually deleted right away. What actually happens is that the entities DeletionStateCode field is updated from 0 to 2. A process later comes along and cleans up the records that have been "marked for deletion" and it does so in the the proper order so that there are no referential integrity errors. This is done because the DELETE operation in SQL is relatively expensive compared to an UPDATE. In Microsoft CRM 1.x and 3.0, this asynchronous delete operatio
Jason, myself and others have been working on this white paper for a long while now and I am very happy to finally be able to make it available to the world. Jason and I have been thinking and talking about Microsoft CRM as a full "application builder" since we were on the product team and before Microsoft CRM 3.0 even shipped. With the release of Microsoft CRM 4.0 and a lot of "wins" for Microsoft CRM over the years; this vision is finally taking hold. Steve Ballmer even referred to it as "XRM" during this years Convergence in Orlando.
Here is the introduction:
Ta
Sunday 4/13/2008 10:07 PM by Aaron Elder
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I have blogged in the past on the challenges of installing CRM 3.0 rollup updates on a single VPC where both the Outlook Client and Server are installed on the same machine. For Rollup Updates #2 I developed a hack and procedure to accomplish this and for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Rollup Update #3, this procedure needs to be modified slightly. The original options are still valid to get past the "An unexpected internal error has occurred" message:
Option #1 Is to uninstall the client, install the server update and then re-install the client. This o
There is a lot of confusion out there around what will and will not upgrade and what happens after you upgrade from CRM 3.0 to 4.0. The root of this is around the fact that the way Picklist INT valuing has changed in CRM 4.0 to better accommodate future growth. In particular if you customize a system-provided Picklists under CRM 3.0, the INTs assigned would be sequential to the system values. So if the last value provided by Microsoft was 4, your picklist option would get 5. In CRM 4.0, this has changed to start all user-defined picklist options on system-provided pickl
One of my favorite new features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the ability to check for updates prior to setup running. This all but guaranteed that Microsoft would not have to issue a "recall" of the RTM bits as they would be able to update even the setup package if required. This was a problem for any early "downloaders" of CRM 3.0 several years ago. Anyway, in addition to being able to fix setup... this feature now allows Microsoft to slipstream fixes into the installation bits going forward. It appears that the first of these updates has now shipped as you can see from the server
Microsoft has released the first of what I am sure will be many help content updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. This update is available here and is a very easy install. The Help System in Microsoft CRM of course has a special place in my heart as I was the original developer that wrote it and continue to this day to work with the Help Team on system improvements in CRM 4.0. Andrew Becraft posted about this update here and the update is available in 3 separate installers:
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 server (32-bit)
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 server (64-bit)
Micr
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Service Scheduling Engine is a powerful and mysterious system. As a CRM developer you may be asking will this engine meet your needs? It's hard to say because the system has limited documentation available and there is generally very little information available on how this thing actually works. In this post I hope to document a small portion of the system and provide some sample code to show how to programmatically define an availability schedule for a piece of equipment.
A good place to start to understand the basics of the Service Scheduling Engine is to
One of the many new features available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is the ability to add multiple 1:N relationships between the same two entities. You can also determine how that relationship will appear to the end user.
The options include:
Do Not Display
New in CRM 4.0, this option is useful if you want to create relationships that you will manage via code, or that will be exposed to users in more useful ways than the Left Navigation Bar (like via a Report)
Use Plural Name
While not officially a new feature of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0; the ability to install CRM from a network share (or shared drive within Virtual PC 2007) is very much welcomed. Generally speaking this should "just work", however some of you may be getting an error when you attempt to run setup and clicking next after selecting the SQL server to use. The error looks something like this and says setup cannot find the file Reserved.sql.
The reason for this seems to be that the Config folder is not copied from the setup source location into the temporary location
I have long maintained a list of Dynamics CRM build numbers and I thought I would continue the tradition for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (formerly know as "Titan"). Build Number Released Details 4.0.7333.3 12/19/2007 RTM 4.0.7333.2 December 2007 RC2 (Internal) 4.0.7309.0 November 2007 RC0 (Limited Release) 4.0.7219.10 August 2007 Beta - CTP3 4.0.7044.22 May 2007 Beta - CTP2 4.0.6319.16
On Wednesday I had the privilege of being a guest on the MSDN Channel9 Program, "geekSpeak". The result was discussion around Microsoft CRM as a development platform and a great session of Q&A on how to approach certain problems and how to get started developing on Microsoft CRM.
http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=348962
Enjoy,
On a recent project, one of our senior CRM development team members had the challenge of importing Opportunities that were in the middle of a workflow. Here is a post Chris Scott worked up on the subject:
Recently I worked on a data migration project from a legacy system to Microsoft CRM. As part of this migration, opportunities were migrated including a field that was essentially equivalent to a workflow stage. The customer wanted to use the CRM workflow and update each opportunities workflow stage to the legacy system’s equivalent. The customer’s preference was to set the stage of t
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