Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list April 2020

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform -2020 Wave 1 Topics

• Global notification using Javascript in Dynamics 365 (Preview) by @priyesh_wngman7
• Power Automate Flows now available within business process flows by @inogic
• Introducing mixed reality in Power Apps (Private Preview)
• Power Apps 2020 Wave 1 updates are out now!
• 5 new to be excited about in the April 2020 Dynamics 365 Update! by @encloud9
• Advanced filtering options for home grids now available - Release 2020 Wave 1
• New omnichannel, AI and IOT updates for Customer Service

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Have you checked your Dynamics 365 storage lately? - strange update in required storage for webresources and ribbon by @crmkeeper
• Call Azure Function from Dynamics 365 webhooks
• Microsoft Power BI - CRM/ERP integration on 33 cent per day
• Get started with Dynamics 365 Field Service with demo data
• Power BI dashboards for Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations via the Common Data Service - Part 3
• Understanding Dynamics 365 for IT: Architecture, integration and more
• The easiest CDS/Dynamics 365 connection ever by @crmtipoftheday
• Dual write automates data flow between Dynamics 365 applications and Common Data Service
• United at last: Dynamics 365 dual write goes GA
• Introducing command checker for model-app ribbons
• Announcing a lap around Microsoft Graph Toolkit series
• Model-driven Power Apps and Permissions
• Deeply integrate your apps in Microsoft Teams with context variables
• What developers need to know about the activity entity
• Accessing admin areas from a unified app
• Installing Field Service Power BI Reporting suite
• Introducing the Microsoft Teams and Power Apps whitepaper
• Using business process flows in a canvas app
• New refresh cadence for PowerApps environments

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

• Take ownership of your digital tools
• Price points of the Power Platform
• The last nail in the on-premise coffin
• CDS FAQ for the Power Apps makers
• Some ideas and techniques for customer churn analysis
• Accelerating digital transformation in manufacturing

Power Platform ALM process guidance published and Power Platform Build Tools general available

Microsoft just published dedicated documentation around Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with the Power Platform and Dynamics 365. This is a great starting point for everyone who wants to mature their development and deployment practice.

At the same time Microsoft announced the general availability of their Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools for Azure DevOps .  If you have used the preview version of the Power Platform Build Tools you will need to install the new extensions and you will need to recreate your build and release pipelines. You can install the Power Platform Build Tools extension from Azure Marketplace and they are free to use within Azure DevOps Services (online) or Azure DevOps Server.

Keep in mind though that setting up a good ALM practice, is about more than just tooling being in place (For a good discussion take a look at Continuous Integration is not a tooling problem)

If you are already using tooling like the Power DevOps Tools from @waelhaemze, it might not (yet) make sense to switch over but if you are new to DevOps/ALM for Dynamics 365/Power Platform definitely take a look (for more background on this topic see My Perspective on the PowerApps Build Tools for Azure DevOps )

References

• Let's chat about the new Power Platform ALM guidance (Youtube) with Scott Durow, Jonas Rapp, Tricia Sinclair and Reece Campbell
• Dynamics 365 and ALM/DevOps Information to get you started
• Getting started with Power DevOps tools (Youtube) from @waelhaemze

Quick tip: generate and integrate mock data for Dynamics 365

If you are doing demos for Dynamics 365 it might be needed to generate mock data - an interesting tool for this is Mockaroo. You can just download a dataset that you generate from the website but Mockaroo also exposes a number of APIs that you access.

An interesting example of leveraging the API is outlined in Power Automate your demo data by @dylanhaskins

Easyrepro - UI automation test library for Dynamics 365 and CDS

With the "One version" update policy of Dynamics 365 (Sales,Customer Service, Field Service,...) it starts making more sense to include some level of test automation in your projects. If you look at the test pyramid - it however also becomes apparent that user interface testing is still quite cumbersome and I think that the majority Dynamics 365 projects do not include any form of automated UI testing.

With the release of the Easyrepro - the automated UI testing framework for Dynamics 365 on Github in June 2017, writing automated UI test has become easier although it still requires basic developer skills and access to Visual Studio tooling.

The purpose of the Easyrepro library is to provide Dynamics customers the ability to facilitate automated UI testing for their projects. The Easyrepo API's provide an easy to use set of commands that make setting up UI testing quick and easy. The functionality provided covers the core CRM commands that end users would perform on a typical workday and developers area able to extend that coverage to more functionality.

If you want to quickly explore what is possible with the EasyRepro framework, clone the repo on Github and take a look at Microsoft.Dynamics365.UIAutomation.Sample project and see how the different test classes are implemented.

Afterwards I highly recommend you to take a look at the excellent series of blog post written by the Microsoft PFE team:

• Test automation and EasyRepro: 01 - Overview and getting started
• Test automation and EasyRepro: 02 - Designing and debugging unit tests
• Test automation and EasyRepro: 03 - Extending the EasyRepro Framework
• Test automation and EasyRepro: 04 - Monitoring and Insight with EeasyRepro
• Test automation and EasyRepro: 05 - Adding EasyRepro Tests to Azure DevOps

References:

• Measuring test automation ROI in the context of continuous testing and devops
• Run and debug unit tests with Test Explorer 
• Reporting on EasyRepro Test runs
• BDD for Dynamics 365 CE Part 2 - Acceptance testing with Specflow and EasyRepro

Resolving xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/pi/.Xauthority on Raspberry Pi

A couple of weeks ago when I tried to start the Raspberry Pi desktop it threw an error " xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/pi/.Xauthority" -  luckily I found a solution on this page  please help -startx fails/hangs, finally returns error message “xauth: timeout in locking authority file /home/pi/.Xauthority ”  - running xauth -b did the trick for me.

Quick tip: reload Python modules in Jupyter with the autoreload magic method

If you are writing your own Python modules and you include them in your Jupyter notebooks you might notice that by default your code updates in the custom Python module are not reflected once the module has been load by Jupyter. You can fix this by adding %autoreload at the top of your notebook.

%load_ext autoreload
%autoreload 2

For the documentation take a look https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/config/extensions/autoreload.html

Quick tip: change Jupyter notebook startup folder in Anaconda

This excellent walk through explains how to change the Jupyter notebook startup folder in Anaconda - quick summary of the steps:

1. Generate config file by running jupyter notebook --generate-config in the Anaconda prompt
2. Open the c:\Users\\.jupyter\jupyter_notebook_config.py
3. Uncomment c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir = '' and fill in your startup folder e.g. 'c:\jupyter_workspace'  

For an overview of all of the configuration setting in the jupyter_notebook_config.py file take a look at Config file and command line options (Jupyter documentation)

Running the Jupyter stock trading notebooks in Azure Notebooks

Update October 2020:  Azure Notebooks Preview will be retired from January 15th, 2021 and all user data will be deleted - for alternatives take a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/notebooks/quickstart-export-jupyter-notebook-project

In the previous blog posts - Using Euronext stock data from Quandl in Jupyter notebooks and Working with multiple time series trading data from Quandl in Jupyter Notebooks I showed how you can use Jupyter notebooks to analyze stock trading running the Anaconda distribution from my local machine. The notebooks are available on Github - https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks

It is however also possible to run them in Microsoft Cloud using Azure Notebooks on  https://notebooks.azure.com/ . Azure Notebooks is a free hosted service  to develop and run Jupyter notebooks in the cloud along with supporting packages for Python, R and F#. You can just login and get started without having to setup or install anything and run the code within your browser.

On the home page you will see a number of Jupyter notebook projects which you can clone into your own personal library.

By default, projects run on the Free Compute tier, which is limited to 4GB of memory and 1GB of data. You can bypass these limitations and increase compute power by using a different virtual machine that you've provisioned in an Azure subscription. For more information see Use Azure Data Science Virtual Machines

To be able to run the Jupyter notebook from https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks/blob/master/Quandl_API_Euronext_ABI_Shared.ipynb on Azure notebooks, the only thing you need to do is installing the Quandl Python module by adding !pip install quandl in a new code cell on the top.

The free compute tier from Azure notebooks is running a custom version of Anaconda but not always the latest version - if you need specific Python modules you need to be aware that the installed version might not always be the latest version

Updates to Dynamics 365 release schedule, unified interface transition and team member license enforcement

As outlined in Our commitment to customers help ensure business continuity Microsoft has delayed some of the mandatory upgrades and changes to existing Dynamics 365 environments - below a short overview:

• Existing Dynamics 365 environments will receive the Wave 2020 update one month later starting beginning of May . See Dynamics 365 release schedule for the exact dates for your geo.
• Deprecation of the legacy web client and the mandatory transition to the Unified Interface is postponed from October 1^th to December 1^th 2020.
• Deprecation of the Dynamics 365 for Outlook (Outlook COM add-in) is scheduled for October 2020 - see The future of Outlook integration for more details
• Technical enforcement for Dynamics 365 Team Members licenses purchased or transitioned after October 1, 2018 will come into effect on January 31, 2021 (extended from September 30, 2020 - initially planned for April 1, 2020). 

Using Power Automate Flows to sent daily RSS digest e-mails of Power Platform documentation updates

It is quite a challenge to keep up with the rapid updates of the Microsoft documentation on Power Platform but did you know that you can use a RSS feed based on a search in the Microsoft documentation? https://docs.microsoft.com/api/search/rss?search=powerapps&locale=en will return a RSS feed with all recently updated pages on https://docs.microsoft.com about the Power Platform.

Power Automate contains a RSS feed to send e-mail template but this flow will sent out an e-mail every time a page is updated which will flood your mailbox. So I built my own flow to receive a daily digest e-mail using Power Automate.

Here are some of the things I learned on the way (to be honest I don't use Power Automate flows that often):

• I trigger the Power Automate Flow on a daily basis so I am using the List All RSS feed items actions to RSS feed items since a specific date (use the formatDateTime function for the expected format)

• Some days no new RSS feed items will be published, so you need to check if the RSS body is not empty, otherwise you will sent out empty e-mails.

• Learn to use the Copy and Paste flow actions  - you won't built the logic correctly in the beginning and with copy and paste you can alter your logic a little easier. 
• Learn basic data operations in Microsoft Power Automate - e.g. you can use the Compose action without the overhead of declaring variables. Since Power Automate is based on Azure Logic Apps - you can also take a look at that documentation e.g. Perform data operations in Azure Logic Apps
• Take a look at the Webinars and videos gallery from the Microsoft Power Automate Community - it helped me understanding the ParseJson function as well as provided some input on using Html Table.

DM me on Twitter (@jopxtwits ) if you are interested in receiving an export of the Power Automate Flow.

What can you do with the Azure Cosmos DB free tier?

Beginning of March 2020, Microsoft announced the availability of a free tier of Azure Cosmos DB (see Azure Cosmos DB Free Tier is now available)

"When free tier is enabled on an Azure Cosmos DB account, you’ll get the first 400 RU/s and 5 GB of storage for free for the lifetime of the account. Additionally, when using shared throughput databases, you can create up to 25 containers that share 400 RU/s at the database level. There’s a maximum of one free tier account per Azure subscription and you must opt-in when creating the account."

But maybe you are wondering what you can actually do with 400 RU/s? Request Units per second (RU/s) represent the "cost" of a request in terms of CPU, memory and IO. In Azure Cosmos DB you can provision "performance" upfront by setting RU/s at database level, collection level or both. It is however also possible to create Azure Cosmos DB containers and databases in autoscale mode  Containers and databases configured in auto scale mode will automatically and instantly scale the provisioned throughput based on your application needs without impacting the availability, latency, throughput, or performance of the workload globally

I can highly recommend you to take a look at the Microsoft Ignite 2019 session - A developer's guide to Azure Cosmos DB, from onboarding to going live in production . The code samples from session are available on Github - https://github.com/deborahc/cosmos-perf-tips

References:

• Choosing the right partition key for cost and performance with Azure Cosmos DB (Youtube 00:14:27)
• Find the  request unit (RU) charge in Azure Cosmos DB
• April 2020 query updates in Azure Cosmos DB
• Free Tier Cosmos DB ARM template
• Raven DB vs Cosmos DB - article is a little outdated due to a number of new updates to Cosmos DB but still quite interesting

Things to watch out for when configuring the export of CDS data to Azure Data Lake

End October 2019 Microsoft announced general availability of the export to Azure Data Lake functionality  (previously called Project Athena) for CDS and Dynamics 365 (Sales, Customer Service and Field Service).

It is quite easy to setup by following the steps outlined in the announcement blog post  or the official documentation on exporting entity data to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 - there are however two important prerequisites:

• The Azure storage account must be created in the same Azure AD tenant as your CDS/Dynamics 365 tenant (See subscriptions, licenses, accounts, and tenants for Microsoft's Cloud Offering if you are not familiar to these concepts) and the storage account must be created in the same Azure region (See Data center regions for Power Platform for more details) Fortunately the configuration screen provides these details as well - if the subscription drop down is empty, you probably did not meet one of the above requirements

• The login that you use to configure the Export to Data Lake settings needs to be an owner of the Azure storage account. If you missed this step you will get an exception in the configuration wizard on the second screen.

References:

• The Common Data in Azure Data Lake Storage - Export to Data Lake
• Publish CDM folder as REST endpoints
• Azure Data Lake with Dynamics 365 FinOps - Customer Insights and the Power Platform

Working with multiple time series trading data from Quandl in Jupyter Notebooks

In the previous example - Using Euronext stock data from Quandl in Jupyter notebooks I downloaded a single dataset from Quandl. But it is also possible to download multiple datasets by passing in a list of Quandl codes.

In the example below, I downloaded the prices of a number of diversified holding companies which are traded on Euronext Brussels and compared the cumulative returns (not including dividend payments) using Jupyter Notebooks.

The Quandl Python API allows you to make a filtered time series call and request only specific
columns - in this example the 'Last' (Closing price) is retrieved by specifying the index 4. In a next
step I renamed the columns in the pandas dataframe to make it easier to work with the data
afterwards.



Take a look at the full python notebook at https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks/blob/master/Quandl_Belgian_Holdings-Shared.ipynb to see how this data can be used to visualize cumulative returns for these different stocks

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%matplotlib inline import quandl import matplotlib.pyplot as plt quandl.ApiConfig.api_key = "<Your Key Here>" #Retrieve Last price only for the 5 holdings (excluding mono holdings) trading on Euronext Brussels #Data is available from February 2014 onwards - Ackermans Van Haren (ACKB), Brederode (BREB), Sofina (SOF), #GBL and Bois Sauvage (COMB ) data = quandl.get(['EURONEXT/ACKB.4','EURONEXT/BREB.4','EURONEXT/SOF.4','EURONEXT/GBLB.4','EURONEXT/COMB.4']) #Rename column names data.rename(columns={'EURONEXT/ACKB - Last': 'ACKB', 'EURONEXT/BREB - Last': 'BREB','EURONEXT/SOF - Last':'SOF', 'EURONEXT/GBLB - Last':'GBLB','EURONEXT/COMB - Last':'COMB'},inplace=True)

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list March 2020

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform - 2020 Wave 1 Topics

• Routing Rule, Site, Queue Item enhancements added in Unified Client in Dynamics 365 Customer Service – 2020 Release Wave 1
• Rich notes and filter enhancements in Dynamics 365 Timeline Control– 2020 Release Wave 1
• Sales Forecast for Dynamics 365 Sales – 2020 Release Wave 1 – Goals in a new look
• Save standardized PDF documents to Dynamics 365 or SharePoint
• “Change in Default Search behavior in Dynamics 365 in release wave 1”–Inform your customers before it takes them by surprise.
• What’s new in Dynamics 365 2020 Wave 1 release for front-end developers

Technical topics  (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Power Platform Conference 2020 recordings
• Embed a Canvas App in a Model Driven App in full-screen mode by @jonaswauters1
• RSS notifications to your phone using Power Automate by https://twitter.com/priyesh_wngman7
• Power Automate Flows now available from within Business Process Flows
• Power Apps: integrating Azure Functions and Canvas Apps
• D365 Typescript Web Resources - Part 1 - Basics
• Interacting with the Dynamics 365 / Common Data Service Web API from Azure Data Factory by @joejgriffin
• How to use Enhanced Reference Panel in UCI for rendering multiple sub-grids
• Pre-Requisite Questions for Power Platform
• Adaptive Cards – Improved Approvals (Part 1)

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

• Power App Potholes by @stevemordue
• Driving accountability with advanced forecasting in Dynamics 365 Sales
• Improve efficiency and quality with AI-infused finance processes
• Are your best practices out of date
• Why use the Common Data Service?

Using Euronext stock data from Quandl in Jupyter notebooks

The last couple of weeks I have been learning about Python and how to use it for stock and derivative trading. One of the challenges is getting stock trading data for European stocks (without having to pay for it).  One of the first things I started with is using Jupyter notebooks to quickly visualize stock market information.

The easiest way to get started with Jupyter is using an all-in-one Python distribution - the one I used is Anaconda since it is easy to setup and it includes a number of interesting libraries I want to use in next steps.

I like to try out things hands-on but I did use a number of training resources to get up to speed:

• Jupyter Notebook Tutorial: the definitive guide (Datacamp)
• Create and share Analytics with Jupyter Notebooks (Pluralsight) 

To get trading data about European stocks I used Quandl. Quandl is a marketplace for financial and economic data which is either freely available or requires a paid subscription. Data is contributed by multiple data publishers like World Bank, trading exchanges and investment research firms. Quandl provides REST API access to the available data sets but also has specific Python and R libraries. You first need to register to get an API key. A lot of European stocks are traded on Euronext and Quandl provides you access to Euronext data - https://www.quandl.com/data/EURONEXT-Euronext-Stock-Exchange

Install the quandl Python package using the Anaconda command prompt. It is best to setup virtual environments to manage separate package installation that you need for a particular project, isolating the packages in other environments but for simplicity I just installed in the base environment.

Next it is quite easy to retrieve stock data from Quandl - you first import the quandl package and next you call the quandl.get() method. By default, Quandl will retrieve the dataset into a pandas DataFrame. Since I specified no additional parameters, the entire timeseries dataset was retrieved - from February 2014 until now. Afterwards I used the plot command which uses the matplotlib library to display a graph of the closing prices.

For the full Jupyter notebook take a look at Github https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks/blob/master/Quandl_API_Euronext_ABI_Shared.ipynb

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list February 2020

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform - 2020 Wave 1 Topics

• Series of blog posts from @nishantranacrm  Email template enhancements in Dynamics 365 for Sales – 2020 Release wave 1 , Configure Sales Hub from Centralized Location (General Settings Section added) for Dynamics 365 for Sales – 2020 Release wave 1 and Customize Case Resolution Dialog Box – 2020 Release Wave 1
• Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 1 Notes by @D365Goddess

Technical topics  (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Log telemetry for your Apps using Azure Application Insights
• Introducing Power Apps Monitor
• Improved performance center in Dynamics 365 model driven apps
• Creating activities using Power Automate
• Check managed solution installation failures in solution history in Dynamics 365 CE
• How to execute an entity bound action using the Dynamics 365 Web API
• PowerApps Community plan  - get a free environment for individual use
• CDS/CRM SDK – WS-Trust auth and OrganizationServiceProxy Deprecated, what does it mean?
• .NET Core CDS SDK Alpha Availability
• Unified Interface App URLs – 3 different ways by @priyesh_wngman7 

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

• Using AI to build a modern field service organization
• Notes analysis from Sales Insight by @inogic
• Shining a light on shadow IT by @stevemordue
• Critical comments: where customer experience is won or lost
• Moving legacy Dynamics to the Power Platform/Dynamics 365 (online)
• Using playbooks in Dynamics 365 CE
• Introducing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations
• New AI features connect and extend insights across the organization

Quick tip: Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams network assessment tool

To ensure that your network meets the requirements for using Skype for Business or Microsof Teams for audio and/or video calls, you can download and run the Skype for Business Network Assessment tool.

Generating Azure Application Insight Key in Azure DevOps pipeline

If you want to generate an Application Insights key in your Azure DevOps pipeline - you can use the the PowerShell code snippet below in a Azure PowerShell task.

Look at Automate Azure Application Insight resources using PowerShell and New-AzureRmApplicationInsightsKeyApiKey for more details.

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Install-Module AzureRM.ApplicationInsights -force -verbose -scope CurrentUser Import-Module AzureRM.ApplicationInsights $resourcegroupname ='rg_func****' $aicomponentname ='func****' $permissions = @("ReadTelemetry", "WriteAnnotations") $apikeydescription = 'testapikey' New-AzureRmApplicationInsightsApiKey -ResourceGroupName $resourcegroupname -Name $aicomponentname -Description $apikeydescription -Permissions $permissions

Azure Application Insights for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solution architects and consultants

A best practice which is quite often overlooked is enabling monitoring and logging capabilities in your applications or solutions. You should always monitor your applications/solutions whether they run in the cloud or on premise because you want to know when something fails (before the users start complaining) and also understand how users are working with your solutions.

Both Dynamics 365 and Power Platform have the option to enable integration with Azure Application Insights - but what is Application Insights?

Azure Application Insights  is a feature of Azure Monitor and it is basically an APM (Application Performance Management) tool. Application Insights provides standard integration with a lot of Azure components adding automatic monitoring capabilities but you can also extend it with custom monitoring so if you get an exception in your code that is unhandled Azure Application Insights will pick this up. You can use it for on-premise and cloud applications but the ease with which you can instrument your applications might differ.

You can integrate Application Insights into your model-driven apps (either Dynamics 365 first party apps which you extended or completely custom-model driven apps) by using the Javascript SDK (See Application Insights for web pages for more details). Unfortunately the old documentation on this topic has disappeared - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-insights-sample-mscrm/ now does a redirect to the general document. 


Luckily @DanzMaverick wrote an interesting plugin for XrmToolBox which allows you to easily instrument your different model driven forms.  Be sure to update to the latest version though since it contains a number of fixes. If you want to keep up to date with updates on this interesting tool follow https://github.com/Power-Maverick/ApplicationInsightsManager

Using Application Insights Manager plugin you will be able to instrument a number of different model forms using just a number of clicks - behind the scenes it will wire up your forms with the required JavaScript web resources.

A recent update on the Power Platform also allows you to log telemetry for your Canvas Apps using Application Insights.

Dynamics 365 can also leverage Azure components like Azure web apps, web jobs or Azure functions which will also require monitoring and logging capabilities. Depending on the type of component you might get out of the box monitoring or you might need to use code based monitoring - most scenarios are described in the documentation - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/app-insights-overview

Things I learned when using Azure Application Insights in the last couple of months:

• To analyse the metrics from the Application Insights logs you can leverage the same Log analytics engine which is available in Azure monitor. Queries are written using the Kusto Query Language. There is also a Pluralsight training - The basics of KQL (Kusto Query Language) from scratch
• You can also feed Power BI from Application Insights or use the Azure Application Insights REST API to overcome the 10.000 item limit of running KQL queries in the Azure Portal
• Pricing for Application Insights is based on the volume of telemetry data that your applications sends (and web test if you are using these) - so to avoid increasing costs take a look at Sampling in Application Insights if you are instrumenting components which are handling a large amount of request

Enabling C# 7.1 in Visual Studio 2017 projects

Today, when I tried to compile one of the Visual Studio projects in our solution - I received the exception "Feature 'default literal' is not available in C# 7.0. Please use language version 7.1 or greater". (For more info see default literal in C# 7.0)

To enable C# 7.1 you need to following these steps:

• Right click on your project and select Properties, next navigate to the build tab and click Advanced

• Next you can either choose C#7.1 from the list or choose C# latest minor version (latest).