Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list July 2020

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• SLA's in the Unified Interface
• Use SQL to query data (Common Data Service)
• Tabular Data Stream (TDS) Protocol endpoint for Common Data Service
• DirectQuery CDS from Power BI by @crmchartguy
• XrmToolBox school (Youtube playlist)
• How to convert an unmanaged solution into a managed solution in Dynamics 365
• Power Platform DevOps: Part 5 - Deconstructing the framework: solutions project
• Create engaging messages with Adaptive Cards (Youtube 001:12:05)
• Power Automate Saturday Playlist (Youtube)
• Power Apps Checker now analyses modern web syntax (up to ES9)
• Monitor now supports model driven apps
• Setting sub-grid filterxml in the unified interface and other naughty things by @ddlabar
• Overcoming 5 top challenges with embedded canvas apps
• Collaborate and debug an app together in real time with monitor
• Get a users last logon time in Dynamics 365  by @nishantranaCRM
• How to restrict users from executing on demand workflows
• Enhanced integrated calendar experience in Dynamics 365 Sales
• How to use enhanced reference panels in UCI for rendering multiple subgrids
• How to merge solutions in Power Apps and Dynamics 365 with XrmToolBox Solution Mover
• Power Platform - Talking about the underdog
• Send a Power App push notification using flow to open a record in a canvas app
• How to power up Teams using Power Virtual Agents with Luise Freese (#LessCodeMorePower youtube video) with @LuisFreese and the associated blog post https://m365princess.com/how-to-use-power-virtual-agents-to-simplify-it-and-unfck-user-experience/ 

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

• Announcing Power Platform and Teams updates to help customers adapt to remote work
• Go with what you know: the value of long term customers
• Omnichannel Engagement Hub: configuring outbound messaging by @tassya
• Forms Pro is now Customer Voice by @juliandynamics
• Are you an app person or a flow person? 
• Gartner positions Dynamics 365 Field Service Magic Quadrant Leader
• Telstra citizen developers automate processes with Power Apps in Microsoft Teams, giving million of minutes back to the business

Notes on learning to work with the Microsoft Graph API

Microsoft Graph is a REST API which allows you to access Microsoft Cloud services (e.g. Office 365 service like Microsoft Teams, OneDrive,Planner, SharePoint, etc.. but also enterprise mobility and security services like Azure AD, Identity Manager, etc..) resources using a single endpoint. You can use it for example for querying data in Outlook/Exchange and OneDrive but in the past couple of weeks I mainly used it for Microsoft Teams. The easiest way to get started with the Microsoft Graph API is the Microsoft Graph Explorer.

I learned quite a lot from the 30 days of Microsoft Graph blog series - a highly recommended starting point - for other resources take a look at the references section below.

References:

• Overview of Microsoft Graph
• Getting started with Microsoft Graph (Youtube 00:04:46)
• Graph explorer  - https://aka.ms/ge
• Microsoft Graph tutorials
• A lap around the Microsoft Graph Toolkit - https://aka.ms/mgtlap
• Build apps with Microsoft Graph - Associate (Microsoft Learn)
• Getting started with Microsoft Graph API for developers

Don't forget to update older client applications for Dynamics 365 to the correct .NET Framework version

I lost 30 minutes this morning when trying to troubleshoot an older console app (written in 2017) which refused to connect to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. It was only after updating the Nuget packages for Microsoft.CrmSdk.CoreAssemblies  that I noticed that I was still building against .NET Framework 4.5.2 which is not supported anymore.

Reference:

• Visual Studio and the .NET Framework (Dynamics 365 Developer Guide)

Quick tip: SQL access to Common Data Service using Tabular Data Stream (TDS)

Recently Microsoft announced Power BI DirectQuery support (in preview) to the Common Data Service (CDS)  using Tabular Data Stream. You can also leverage this  CDS TDS endpoint within SQL Server Management Studio to write SQL queries against the CDS database. You can connect using the base url of your CDS instance and add the port 5558. To authenticate you will need to use Azure Active Directory - Password.

By default this functionality is not enabled, so you if you try to use SQL Server Management Studio you will get below exception.

As outlined on http://aka.ms/enablesqlforcds, you will need to to go the Power Platform Admin Center to switch on the TDS support.

References:

• DirectQuery CDS for Power BI
• Tabular Data Stream (TDS) Protocol endpoint for Common Data Service (CDS)

Quick tip: find duplicate records in Dynamics 365 with Deduplicator plugin for XrmToolBox

 If you want to quickly scan your Dynamics 365 or CDS instance for duplicate records, take a look at the Deduplicator plugin for XrmToolbox. It provides you with the option to specify one or more fields for a specific entity as matching criteria (with option to ignore blank values, leading and trailing white space and taking into account casing) and choose which additional fields to display for the duplicate results. 

Notes on the Power Virtual Agent in a day lab

Microsoft recently also released a Power Virtual Agent in a day and I decided to give it a try. Power Virtual Agents are one of the components in the Power Platform which allow you to built intelligent chat bots without any coding or AI experience.

Since Power Virtual Agents are built on the Power Platform and the Azure Bot Framework you still have the option to extend the capabilities to suit your organisations needs.

Some notes on the Power Virtual Agent lab:

• The creation of a virtual agent or bot is super easy and intuitive with a simple graphical interface for authoring the logic  that will drive your bots. The authoring canvas for the conversation tree has a great user experience and enables non-developers to create a powerful chatbot experience.

• After you import the SolutionPowerVirtualAgentInADay.zip solution file, you will need to reconfigure the connections in the different Power Automate Flows - to do this you will need to use the unique name of the CDS instance - so if you have used a Dynamics CRM instance you can not use the readable name - don't forget to add the region shorthand as well.
• If you are familiar enough with Dynamics 365 and/or Power Platform you will be able to complete the labs in a couple of hours.
• The built-in integration with Power Automate allows you to leverage the over 250+ external services and systems so the only limit is your imagination.

• To try out transferring a chat bot session to a human agent, the easiest option is to use Omnichannel for Customer Service (See Setting up Omnichannel for Customer Service on an existing Dynamics 365 trial for how to try this out). After you have completed t  Only limited documentation is available on how to write logic for escalating to an agent if you are not using Omnichannel for Customer service - see Configure hand-off to any generic engagement hub and code on Github

References:

• Introduction to Power Virtual Agents (Youtube 00:52:17)
• Create, test and deploy your bot with Virtual Agent for Customer Service (Youtube 00:10:48)
• PVA Series - real QnA chatbot with QnA maker
• Building proactive bot with Power Virtual Agent
• Create chatbot using Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for your customers 
• Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service (Youtube 00:08:13)
• Create, test and deploy your bot with Virtual Agent for Customer Service (Youtube 00:10:08)
• Power Virtual Agents Solution packaging (Youtube)

Quick tip : how to check if a Microsoft Teams channel exists in a Power Automate Flow

The new Microsoft Teams connector (Preview) in Microsoft Power Automate Flow makes Microsoft Teams automation scenarios a lot easier. The List channels action will return you a list of one or more channels for a Team. If you want to check if a channel with a specific name already exists you can  use the contains function. (For a good overview see Reference guide to using functions in expressions for Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate)

Setting up Omnichannel for Customer Service on an existing Dynamics 365 trial

Omnichannel for Customer Service is a Microsoft first party Dynamics 365 app which extends Dynamics 365 Customer Service which enables you to connect different channels (SMS, chat, Facebook, etc...) to your existing Dynamics 365 Customer Service App.

Listed below are  the different steps required to setup a demo scenario with chat integration for Omnichannel for Customer Service in a blank (no first party app selected upon trial setup) demo trial environment  which had customer service installed afterwards:

1. Omnichannel for Customer Service is an add-on which requires a separate license so you first need to add this add-on in your tenant. Go to Billing > Purchase Services and select add-ons. Search for Dynamics 365 Customer Service Digital Messaging add-on trial and select it.

2. After enabling the add-on you will need to provision Omnichannel for Customer Service by first providing data access consent and in a next step provisioning the Omnichannel for Customer Service application. The official Microsoft documentation still show how to to this from the legacy Dynamics 365 admin portal but you can do this from the new Power Platform Admin Portal as well - click the three dots and select manage for the Omnichannel for Customer Service

3. In the separate Omnichannel for Customer Service screen you will be able to enable the different channels that you want to support. The initial setup might take a couple of hours to complete so check the same page for the status of the setup later on.
   
4. Next you will need to assign the "Dynamics 365 Customer Service Digital Messaging add-on" license to the users who need have a  Omnichannel for Customer Service security role.

5. To enable chat integration, you need to create a code snippet to embed the chat control on your website or portal. You can follow the steps on the Microsoft Omnichannel for Customer Service Administrator > Quickly configure a chat widget  which use a Customer Service Portal but you can add this chat widget to your own website as well.

6. Support agents can use the Omnichannel for Customer Service app to interact with the users to follow up on their questions and complaints. When a new conversation comes in, it will be routed to available agents who can accept this incoming conversation. (Take a look at Understand unified routing and work distribution to understand how you automate work assignment across channels taking into account agent's capacity and skill sets)

7. A customer agent will be able to interact with the customer using an inline chat window which is built on top of the Customer Service application which means that you will be able to leverage the full available context of the customer (existing contact info, open cases, etc ...)

There were lot of new features added to Omnichannel for Customer Service in the 2020 release wave 1 so definitely take a look at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit recording below or take a look at the Omnichannel for Customer Service sessions on Microsoft Learn.

References:

• Using omnichannel for customer service to deliver personalized support (Business Applications Summit 2020 recording)
• Omnichannel for Customer Service Collection -  set of blog posts on Omnichannel for Customer Service (previously called Omnichannel Engagement Hub) by Neil Parkhurst
• A quick guide to Omnichannel for Customer Service
• Try channels in Omnichannel for Customer Service
• Setup WhatsApp channel (Preview) in Omnichannel for Customer Service
• Omnichannel for Customer Service blog posts by @thecrmninja

How to use secrets in Jupyter Notebooks with python-dotenv

It is not a good idea to embed the the secrets (credentials, keys, etc..) that you need in your Python code directly in your Jupyter Notebooks. You can store these secrets in environment variables but an alternative is using the python-dotenv library. Python-dotenv is a library that reads key-value pairs from  a .env file and adds them to environment variables.

To get started you need to install the latest version of python-dotevn and then you will need to create a .env file in the same folder as your .ipynb files.

Tip: You may not be able to create .env file directly in Windows Explorer - use the command prompt and the echo command to create this file.

You can read a key-value pair in just one line of code after you loaded the extension and the os module which provides functions to interact with the operating system.

Source code is available on https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks/blob/master/dotenv.ipynb

References:

• How to not embed credentials in Jupyter notebooks

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.

Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list May 2020

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• What's new in Microsoft Teams | Build Edition 2020
• Simplified system configuration in Dynamics 365 Sales
• Embedding canvas Power Apps in Microsoft Teams from @inogic
• Model-driven Power Apps and permission issues
• Power Automate Flows now available from within Business Process Flows
• Advanced filtering options for home grid views now available - 2020 Release Wave 1 
• Make http request from flow in Power Automate
• Monitoring the Power Platform: Introduction and Index
• Lookup filtering enhancements in Unified Interface
• Dataflows - behind the scenes by @crmkeeper
• Dynamics 365 Assistant for Microsoft Teams (Preview)
• Exam MB-400: Microsoft PowerApps + Dynamics 365 developer - my experience and study guide
• Embedding canvas apps within model driven apps, Power Apps Portal, Power BI and custom websites
• Why would you use "Stage for Upgrade" with managed solutions?
• Adaptive cards for beginners - monitor a hashtag on Twitter by @LuiseFreese
• Importing and exporting Power Apps package as a SharePoint list form by @TomaszPoszytek
• Moving a Power Automate Flow from My Flows into a CDS solution

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

• Steve has a third chat with Charles Lamanna (Microsoft CVP Citizen Application Platform) by @stevemordue
• Reduce supply chain disruptions with AI,IoT and mixed reality
• 13 signs your Dynamics 365 project is doomed
• Why Power Platform licensing is complex by @jukkan
• How to use Predictive Lead and Opportunity Scoring feature of Dynamics CRM  
• Maintain business continuity with Dynamics 365 Field Service
• Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service: an all-in-one platform by @hitachicrm
• The new Field Service (Dynamics 365) mobile app and Next generation field service mobile app available
• CDS and CDM are not the same ! Difference explained by @radacad_com

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.

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

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

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.