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.
%load_ext autoreload %autoreload 2
