Notepad++ is one of my favorite tools but it is not always easy to remember which plugin you need to install again after moving to a new laptop. So quick reminder: if you want to format XML files in Notepad++ the easiest thing to do is installing XML Tools using the Notepad++ plugins manager. Next you can use the Plugins>XML Tools>Pretty print
Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)
Join CRMUG Belux on November 20th at 12:00 CET for a free webinar to learn about the Power Accelerate ISV solution (https://www.poweraccelerate.com) which accelerates your Microsoft Power Platform journey and makes modernization onto the Microsoft Power Platform fast and seamless.
No preregistration required - join us by clicking this Power Accelerate webinar link on Friday November 20th or download the Outlook calendar reminder for the Power Accelerate webinar.
Agenda:
Speaker: Bert Wijns, Co-founder of the Power Accelerate ISV solution - Experienced subject matter expert guiding enterprise customers, implementation teams and partners through implementations of the Microsoft Power Platform.
Some of you are already using automated UI testing for PowerApps model-driven apps (or for Dynamics 365 App extensions) using Easyrepro - the UI automation test library for Dynamics 365 and CDS but it is also possible to Automate your canvas app tests in your DevOps Pipeline.
The PowerAppsTestAutomation project on Github abstracts the complexity of writing code to login the canvas apps, add application logging and executing a test case or a test suite.
References:
You might have noticed that there are two different urls that you can use for retrieving an access token in Azure AD:
References:
On November 3th, the Realdolmen Power Platform team organizes a free webinar on how you can leverage Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI to support quality assurance processes.
Improve your quality assurance using the Power Platform webinar registration link (November 4th - 14:00-15:15 CET) .
Session description: With low-code platforms being a trendy topic of 2020, chances are that this isn’t your first invite for a webinar on this topic. But how about a real use-case in action? Let us show you a practical approach on how to combine the ease of use of the Power Platform with common Quality Assurance tasks. We take you through the process of digitizing a paper process for quality assurance, automating manual tasks to optimize efficiency and displaying interactive overviews for audit purpose.
Content packs were used in the past to package and share Power BI objects like datasets, reports and dashboards. Microsoft initially also used content packs to build their own Dynamics 365 solution templates, these solution templates were made available on Microsoft AppSource.
But in 2019, Microsoft introduced the concept of Power BI template apps (See Announcing Power BI template apps general availability) - this also meant that all previous content packs/solution templates became deprecated and some of them got replaced by the template app experience.
Microsoft indeed converted some of the Dynamics 365 content packs into modern Power BI apps and published the updated Power BI apps for Dynamics 365 platform to the Microsoft AppSource. Some of these Power BI apps are tied to a specific Microsoft first party app like Sales Analytics for Dynamics 365 Sales, others can be used by multiple first party apps like Process Analytics for Dynamics 365.
Microsoft partners also build their own Power BI apps for the Dynamics 365 platform and published these to Microsoft AppSource e.g. Microsoft Customer Engagement - Sales Analytics from FuturIT
It is important to understand that you can not modify the Power BI Template Apps easily - the pbix files which drive these Power BI Apps are not downloadable so you can not change the standard reports delivered with these Power BI Apps. Users can however change some parameters in the web view - see Let users personalize visuals in a report - this is however on a per user basis. I however was looking for a way to modify the reports in a similar way which was possible with the content packs.
The workarounds that my colleague @bennidejagere suggested for exporting the underlying model using the XMLA endpoint in Power BI is a little bit out of my comfort zone and does not allow me to get at the report files so I looked at little further.
However the existing solution templates from Microsoft were moved to open source end 2018 (See Power BI solution templates moving to open source) and added to the BusinessPlatformApps github repo. Microsoft however stopped maintaining the original reports but you can still find the original Power BI reports which were part of these packs.
Important: The Power BI template apps for Dynamics 365 Sales and the Process Analytics for Dynamics 365 are also available for download from the Microsoft site on Customize Power BI template apps for Dynamics 365
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My installation of SQL Server Management Studio 18.0 last week always got stuck on the initial "Loading packages. Please wait..." screen. The solution which worked for me was deleting the registry key underneath "HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio" as outlined in Installing SSMS 18 won't go past loading packages phase.
Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)
Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Application Platform consultants, project managers and power users
I encountered below exception when building a ASP.NET Core project in Visual Studio - "The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET Core 2.2. Either target .NET Core 2.1 or use a version of the .NET SDK that supports .NET Core 2.2".
Luckily this forum post pointed in the correct direction - first check the installed version of the .NET Core SDK on your machine. 
If you are using Visual Studio 2017, you will need to install 2.2.1xx of the SDK to support targetting .NET Core 2.2. You can download the different versions of the .NET Core 2.2 SDK on https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core/2.2
Quandl also offers free commodity price data for almost 100 commodities ( See API for commodity data) so I decided to create a Jupyter notebook comparing SIPEF's stock price with the price of palm oil. Take a look at the full notebook I shared on github if you want to learn why - https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks/blob/master/Quandl_API_Euronext_SIPEFPalmOil.ipynb
Remarks:
sipcolor = 'tab:red' fig,ax1 = plt.subplots() ax1.plot(data['SIP'],color=sipcolor) ax1.set_ylabel('SIPEF',color=sipcolor) #Instantiate a second axes that shares the same x-axis ax2 = ax1.twinx() ax2.plot(data['PPOIL']) ax2.set_ylabel('PALM OIL USD') plt.gcf().set_size_inches(15,8) plt.show()
This weekend I tried out working with Jupyter Notebooks in Visual Studio Code. Since I already have Jupyter up and running as part of the Anaconda distro I thought this would be easy but it took me longer than expected.
First step is to install the Python extension for VS Code and then you can start working with existing Jupyter Notebooks by just double clicking an existing notebook. Unfortunately this immediately threw an exception "Error: Jupyter cannot be started. Error attempting to locate jupyter: 'Kernelspec' module not installed in the selected interpreter." The workaround suggested on StackOverflow Python/Jupyter notebook in VSCode does not use the right environment did not resolve the issue and also the fixes described on Github - New version tries to install kernelspec were not working.
The workaround which seems to be working for me is starting VS Code from the Anaconda Prompt in the Jupyter workspace directory by typing "code ."
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:
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.
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:
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.
