In a previous blog post I mentioned how it can be useful to use the Portals Source Code release to actually step through Portal source code in a debugger. However, there are more great uses for the Portals source code, even if you are using the official Microsoft-hosted option.
I decided to do something a little bit (or a lot) outside my comfort zone and start a YouTube channel where I will be providing quick tips (2-3 minutes) for Dynamics 365 Portals.
I hadn’t gotten the chance to post about the v8.4.1 release of the Portal Capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365, and another new one is already out! So I’ll take this opportunity to talk about v8.4.1, which was released in mid-April and includes a couple major enhancements: accessibility for the out-of-the-box portals, and the ability to search within web file and knowledge base article attachments, as well as v8.4.2, which was released in May and includes some bug fixes.
In a January blog post on upgrading to the xRM Portals Community Edition, I promised to look into automatic cache invalidation. It only took a few months, but I’m finally delivering on that promise.
On Wednesday we released an update to our XrmToolBox Plugin for the Online Management API. This new version includes support for a few enhancements recently introduced in the latest version of XrmToolBox, as well as the removal of the ability to save a backup to Azure, as per a Microsoft request.
As I sit in the Dublin airport awaiting my flight back to Canada, I thought I’d jot down a few notes on the week that was D365UG/CRMUG Summit EMEA 2018.
Last month Microsoft unveiled the Spring Release 2018 of Dynamics 365. While there were a lot of interesting items in the announcement (Marketing, Embedded Intelligence, PowerBI Insights apps), the one that I’m most excited about is the latest release of Common Data Service (CDS), version 2.0. In this post I’ll provide my thoughts on this latest update, as well as what it might mean for the Portal capabilities of Dynamics 365.
Dates, times, time zones, daylight savings time, and anything related to those concepts is an area that has always been a huge pain in the you-know-where for developers. There are so many rules and variables that it’s hard to be confident that your solution is handling all cases perfectly. Thankfully frameworks like .NET remove a lot of the guesswork, but you still have to be careful. In this post, I’ll investigate how Dynamics 365 and Portals handle dates and times.
In order to confirm that much of the functionality in Dynamics 365 Portals works with virtual entities, I needed to have data sources with some pretty specific fields. Rather than hunting for an existing service to meet all of my requirements, I was able to quickly setup a fake OData service hosted in Azure Web Apps that I could use as my Dynamics 365 Virtual Entity Data Source.
So far in this series I’ve provided an intro on virtual entities and a deeper dive into virtual entities and relationships. In this post, I’m finally going to talk about how they work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portals.
