Monthly Archives: December 2017

Developing the plugins – divide and conquer

  One of the main problems with plugin development is that we have a very limited set of debugging techniques. We can use the Tracing Service, but it’s not, really, debugging.. It’s tracing. We can keep throwing errors from the plugin, but that’s just another form of tracing. We can use a plugin profiler, and… Read More »

Plugins recursion – how can you handle it?

  What if you register a plugin step on update of some attribute, and, then, update the same attribute in the plugin again? Dynamics can’t decide, for you, when is the right time to stop this endless loop, but it will detect the recursion, and, after a few repetitions, will stop it: It will do… Read More »

Paging in FetchXml

Was working on the code that needed paging with FetchXml.. There is a good example on MSDN: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg328046.aspx But, in case you don’t want to mess with XmlDocument (not that it’s really that messy), you can easily do the same using simple string Replace – there is an example below. The only tricky part is… Read More »

Dates in Dynamics: TimeZone Independent vs User Local

Did you ever have to look into the DateTime fields behaviour in Dynamics? DateTime fields can be “User Local”, “Date Only”, and “Time Zone independent”: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn946904.aspx If what you see at that link does not look 100% clear (and, to me, it did not..  until a few days ago), let me try to explain it… Read More »

Dynamics Plugin Developer Training

I’ve been working on the Dynamics Plugin Developer Course lately, and, it seems, it’s finally shaping up: Plugin Developer Course At this point, I may need a few “testers”  (although, guinea pigs might be a better name for what you are going to be up to since I really need to test the whole model on… Read More »

Dynamics 365: The craziest thing I learned lately..

You know how we’ve always been looking for ways to export data from Dynamics, and that’s never been a simple task. There are reports, there are templates, there are plugins, workflows, and custom actions.. But how about this (hint – it’s all javascript): This is something that I learned from the guys at MNP (former… Read More »