Phil Edry’s Dynamics CRM Blog

Here’s yet another link to a post I wrote for Altriva Solutions’ blog. Intro:

Here’s a quick gotcha I saw on the CRM Forums. When configuring the CRM Client for Outlook, you enter http://servername:port/ORGNAME in the Internet address field and you get a cryptic error stating “Mandatory updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM could not be applied successfully. Try running the application again.”

Read more…

Here’s a quick gotcha. If you’re going through the walkthroughs for using the CRM 4.0 Online Web Services, you might run into a runtime error when you reference the sample dll if you’re deving on an x64 workstation. The error will look like: “An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×8007000B)”

That’s because the helper dll’s that Microsoft provides to help with Passport authentication are x86 dlls. To fix this issue, stop using these helper dll’s, or target x86 in your build settings. The steps to do this are:

1. In Visual Studio, right-click your project and click “Properties”.

2. In the “Build” tab, set your “Platform Target” to “x86″.

-Phil

Here’s another link to a post I wrote for Altriva Solutions’ blog. Intro: 

Did you know that you can send a hyperlink shortcut to an entity in CRM 4.0 over email? This functionality is especially useful when team members are collaborating on a customer or case together and want an easy way to link to what they’re working on so that the collaborating team member won’t have to search for the record to find it. But what happens if one team member connects to CRM 4.0 over the company intranet, while the other team member connects using IFD (Internet Facing Deployment)? Depending on network infrastructure, chances are that the sent shortcut will not work for both users. This blog entry will describe a workaround for this scenario.

Read more…

We ran into this issue at a client after the last Windows Update patch Tuesday. The Customer Effective Blog has a solution. However, this will not solve the problem in all environments. The only sure fire way to fix this issue regardless of corporate security policy is to uninstall the Windows Update for Internet Explorer.

Update: Mike has posted a comment with more information regarding this issue. Looks like you can edit the blank.aspx page as a workaround. Look at the comments for details.

Everyone’s favorite nightstand reading is now better than ever.

Thanks to the CRM Team Blog for pointing us to the new version. They advertise “Over 30 corrections and revisions”, but these are largely related to grammar and other minor changes. One welcome addition is help on using NLB to install CRM 4.0 on multiple computers.

The MSDN link doesn’t seem to work (at least not on Firefox) but this link works.

I came upon this blog entry when attempting to configure CRM 4.0 Client for Outlook. I kept getting: “The configuration wizard cannot connect to the Microsoft CRM server. This might indicate that the server is down.”

Luckily, rmaclean has found a few ways to fix this. I’ve never seen so many positive replies to a blog post!

http://www.sadev.co.za/node/155

Thanks rmaclean!

p

The StringMap table is a handy source for selecting picklist values — but it’s essentially readonly. Picklist values are stored in the FieldXml field of the OrganiationUIBase table, as well as in the StringMap table. So if you insert into the StringMap alone, your values will be overwritten when you republish.

WARNING: The following is unsupported.

If you need to add a large number of picklist values, you’ll have to keep the two sources synchronized by doing the following:

1. Export the entity containing the picklist attribute to which you want to add the values.
2. Take a copy of the exported customizations to keep as a backup in case this breaks everything (always a risk with unsupported customizations… better yet, back up the CRM databases just in case.)
3. Open the exported XML file in your favorite XML editor.
4. Search for the attribute you want to update.
5. Carefully add the attribute values following the formatting of the existing picklist values. (Should look something like the below XML.)
6. Re-import the customizations.
7. Publish the imported entity. (If this doesn’t work, publish all entities.)

              <options>
                <option value=”1″>
                  <labels>
                    <label description=”Sample Value 1″ languagecode=”1033″ />
                  </labels>
                </option>
                <option value=”2″>
                  <labels>
                    <label description=”Sample Value 2″ languagecode=”1033″ />
                  </labels>
                </option>
              </options>

-p

A quick lunch break “gotcha” post before I forget:

Have you ever tried to create a new instance of a crm entity via the SDK only to find that none of your custom attributes (or custom entities for that matter) are showing up in your intellisense? What’s worse, you get a compiler error when try to build because your “new_” prefixed attribute isn’t a recognized member of the class (something like: ’<CrmSdk>.<entity>’ does not contain a definition for ‘new_<custom_attribute>’)?

Well, if you added the web reference to the SDK before you added/published your customizations in CRM, you’ll need to “Update Web References” in Visual Studio before it will compile.

To do this:

1. Go to the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio and expand your project.
2. Right-click your “App_WebReferences” or your specific web reference to the CRM SDK and select “Update Web References.”

 -p