Tuesday, May 21, 2019

General availability of PowerApps Solution checker makes it easier to check Dynamics 365 solution quality

On May 2th Microsoft announced the general availability of the PowerApps Solution Checker, tooling which allows you to run a static code analysis of your CDS and Dynamics 365 solutions against a set of best practice rules. By running these checks, you can identify problematic patterns in your code base which might impact performance or maintainability/upgradeability of your code.

Tooling like this is a must have for Dynamics 365 CE Online where releases are delivered on a continuous basis (with bi-weekly releases). With this release schedule, the risk of low quality solutions (from ISVs or SIs) interfering with Microsoft updates becomes more probable.

But this is not only about Microsoft safeguarding their Dynamics 365 SAAS platform but also about delivering value quicker and in a reliable fashion. I truly believe that code quality is a good indicator about how quickly developers can add business value to a software system. Static code analysis tools such as PowerApps solution checker might not be the holy grail but they at least give you an indication of the amount of technical debt that you have amassed within your Dynamics 365 instances.

I have been using PowerApps solution checker since a couple of months now and for projects with lots of different teams working on solution it allows you to have some indication of code quality without having to delve through 10.000 lines of code.  I also think that announcements such installing the solution checker by default, introduction of the Solution Health Hub and the announcement of PowerShell script support coming soon are showing Microsoft’s commitment on finally delivering on a good DevOps story for Dynamics 365.

References:

Monday, May 13, 2019

Dynamics 365 monthly reading list April 2019

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Application Platform analysts, project managers and power users

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Quick tip: solving rendering issues in PowerPoint presenter mode

After upgrading to a newer version of Office, my PowerPoint slides displayed incorrectly in presenter mode – see screenshot below. I googled around but did not find anything useful.


Fortunately I remembered  a similar issue that I had in Internet Explorer 11 see Solve image rendering problems in Internet Explorer 11 on HP ZBooks. It seems that PowerPoint has a similar setting – go to Options>Advanced and underneath the Display section I had to check the “Disable Slide Show hardware graphics acceleration."