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Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Using a personal access token in Postman to query the Azure DevOps Services REST API

If you want to query the Azure DevOps Services Rest API you first need to be authenticated. The easiest way to do this is to generate a Personal Access Token. If you want to use this token in Postman to authenticate you will need to use Basic authentication, leave the username blank and copy the token in the password input box.

Saturday, June 20, 2020

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list May 2020

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

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

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

How to fix a broken Easyrepro project after upgrading Chrome

After I recently upgraded Chrome I noticed that my Easyrepro test project did not build/run anymore. (read Easyrepro - UI automation test library for Dynamics 365 and CDS if you are not familiar to Easyrepro)

Luckily the exception pointed in the correct direction "System.InvalidOperationException: session not created. This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 79 (SessionNotCreated)".

The EasyRepro testing framework leverages Selenium ChromeDriver so you need to check the compatibility - see https://chromedriver.chromium.org/downloads

To fix the error I just had to update the Nuget package to a version which is compatible with the installed Chrome on my machine.

Storage capacity enforcement for CDS instances

Storage capacity enforcement now seems to activated, this means that when your capacity storage is greater than the entitled capacity, admin operations like creating, copying and restore environments will be blocked.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Farewell to the Dynamics 365 Admin Center

In 2019 Microsoft announced that they would consolidate the different admin centers for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Sales/Customer Service/Field Service. In the meanwhile, more and more functions seem to be moving to the new Power Platform Admin Center. Although the legacy Dynamics 365 admin center deprecation is not listed (yet) on the Important changes (deprecations) coming in Power Apps, Power Automate and model-driven apps in Dynamics 365. I expect this admin portal to quickly fade away.

Update June 28th: @jukkan just mentioned that there is an update in Message Center which officially states that the old Dynamics 365 Admin Center will go away. I like the speed of innovation in the cloud but this seems like incredibly short notice.

To be able to access the Power Platform Admin Portal you will need to assign an appropriate service admin role - see Use service admin roles to manage your tenant for more details.

Features/functionality which is now surfaced in the new Power Platform Admin Portal:

App management in the Applications tab of the legacy Dynamics 365 Admin center has now moved to Power Platform Admin Center - see Manage Dynamics 365 Apps for more details. This applies to installing and managing Microsoft first party apps like Customer Service but also to other apps installed through AppSource. You first need to select your environment in the new admin center and use the Resources>Dynamics 365 apps menu to open the list of available apps to install. This same screen can be used to upgrade existing apps to newer versions. (Unfortunately there is no indication when there is a new app version available)

Creating new Dynamics 365 instances has also moved to Power Platform Admin Center - if you try it from the legacy admin portal - you now get a warning message
Storage details and analytics already moved to Power Platform Admin Center quite a while ago but recently the documentation about the legacy storage model got updated
Backup and restore environments also got some interesting updates with continuous backup. Keep in mind though that backup retention is different for sandbox and production environments

Friday, June 05, 2020

Quick tip: exporting all nuget packages used in Visual Studio solution to text file with PowerShell

Although it is possible to manage Nuget packages at solution level in Visual Studio with the possibility to even consolidate the Nuget packages it might be useful as well to have an overview of all of the packages that you use in another format.

The below PowerShell code snippet allows you to export all used Nuget packages to a text file (you can ignore the exceptions thrown because of projects without Nuget packages).

Get-Content .\[yoursolutionname].sln

| where { $_ -match "Project.+, ""(.+)\\([^\\]+).csproj"", " }

| foreach { "$($matches[1])\packages.config" } | % { Get-Content $_ | Find "<package id" } | Sort-Object -Unique | Out-File -FilePath c:\temp\packages_demo

Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list April 2020

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform -2020 Wave 1 Topics

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

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

Monday, May 18, 2020

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

Friday, May 15, 2020

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

Thursday, May 14, 2020

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:

References:

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

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.

Sunday, May 03, 2020

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

Friday, May 01, 2020

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:

Generate config file by running jupyter notebook --generate-config in the Anaconda prompt
Open the c:\Users\\.jupyter\jupyter_notebook_config.py
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)

Thursday, April 30, 2020

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).

Tuesday, April 28, 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

Monday, April 27, 2020

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:

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

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

%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)

Monday, April 20, 2020

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list March 2020

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform - 2020 Wave 1 Topics

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

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