Books regarding Dynamics CRM 4.0

Today an article of mine has been posted to the Dynamics CRM Team blog as a guest post. This article discusses all the books which are currently available for Dynamics CRM 4.0. Next to these books you can of course get a lot of information in trainings, MOC's, the SDK and from the internet. Drop by at the team blog to look at which books are available and which matches your needs.

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Dynamics CRM Report Modification Walkthrough

There are quite some reports in the out of the box installation of Dynamics CRM 4.0, but these sometimes do not match the exact business requirements. Also the reports which can be created by using the Dynamics CRM Report Builder Wizard cannot contain complex calculations or information of more than two entities. When you do export one of these reports and try to edit this in Visual Studio, then

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More Convergence!

The Convergence EMEA is just one week away. I do now have more information available about my planning for that week. You'll find me at the following times at the following locations:Tuesday 18: 17:30-19:00 MS Pavillion CRM Booth Kiosks 33-36Wednesday 19: 17:00-18:30 MS Pavillion CRM Booth Kiosks 33-36Thursday 20: 9:30-11:30 MS Pavillion CRM Booth Kiosks 33-36Thursday 20: 12:00-13:00 Hall B5.2 -

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Convergence - Ask the expert

In just a couple of weeks there is the Convergence EMEA in Denmark. I'll attend this convergence again and I am looking forward to meeting many of the readers of my blog. On this convergence you can find me at the CRM Booth many times, but there is one place for sure where you can find me. That will be the session IDCRM05: "Microsoft Dynamics CRM: Ask the Community Experts".That session is going

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CRM 5.0 Features

Now that CRM 4.0 is available for almost a year, it is good to start thinking about what investmenst you will make in the coming period and which functionality can wait until the v.next has been released. In this topic I'll list some of the most interesting features that Microsoft has said to be working on:- Adding auditing capabilities out of the box- Deeply integrate SharePoint with CRM for

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Social Media and CRM

Although we're in the middle of web 2.0, most companies do not integrate social media in their organizations, including CRM. Avanade has concluded this based on a research which has been conducted under more than 500 global executives.There are a lot of interesting facts published in the press release which can be downloaded from the CRM Social Media website of Avanade.

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Get rid of "Do you want to close this window?"

You might get a question when opening CRM in Internet Explorer. The question is:The webpage you are viewing is trying to close the window.Do you want to close this window?yes noThis message does appear in CRM 4.0 only when you are using Internet Explorer 7.0 and you have enabled the application mode setting. Nevertheless, it is an anoying message which you can get away!To get rid of this message

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Overview of CRM 4.0 Training & development collateral

Microsoft employee Jon Butler is sending me updates on CRM regularly. This time he has sent an overview of the available training material. Since this is such a usefull list, I thought it would be worth sharing this with you guys!Official Courseware available now These training courses are the Microsoft Dynamics Official Curriculum currently available for CRM 4.0 now, either as soft-copy

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Get the latest hotfixes for the CRM 4.0 outlook client

The product team has posted a blog article about the known issues with their hotfixes on the team blog. I'd strongly recommend everybody to look at this list and to install all applicable hotfixes for your system.The following issues are discussed:1. Outlook hangs during initialization (progress toolbar displays “Loading…” and never finishes)2. With E-mail Auto Promotion Enabled, Outlook may not

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Custom entities and attributes in a plug-in

You cannot create a webservice in Visual Studio when you're writing a plugin. Instead you need to use the method context.CreateCrmService(true);. There is only one single issue when using this approach. You cannot leverage the power of IntelliSense in Visual Studio. Visual Studio will not recognize your custom entities and attributes. How to work with this? The only correct answer is "Dynamic

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Unauthorized error after deploying your custom application

I've been working on deploying an application today. I received the error "Unauthorized" all the time and did not know why. The website was deployed as a new virtual directory within the ISV folder, authentication was set to integrated windows authentication and the password which was supplied was correct. Still I was able to get this error message:Server Error in '/ISV/CustomApplication'

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Convert lead to contact, account and/or opportunity programmatically

Update: The codeproject missed a line of code. After you have executed the InitializeFromRequest, then you'll get a InitializeFromResponse. This response has got a entity in it. This entity you will need to create. The entity does not yet get created by executing the InitializeFromRequest! The line to add is:Guid entityId = service.Create(rps.Entity);Today I needed some code which does convert a

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Plug-in not working

One of the most read pages on my blog is the list of reasons why a callout won't work. Since the release of CRM 4.0 we do not have callouts anymore, but we're using plug-ins for extending CRM. This article will contain all the reasons that I find on why a plug-in is not working.Error:"Unable to load the plug-in assembly"There are multiple reasons why this error can occur. These reasons include:-

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Javascript Files and Caching

You will notice that the performance of Dynamics CRM can be negatively affected when you have loads of Javascript codes embedded into the form of an entity. It is recommended that you take out the Javascript codes from the form and place them in a separate script file which can then be loaded in the form. This will cause the script to be downloaded only once and therefore improve performance when

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Not all emails are sent from MailMerge

Yesterday I looked at an issue with a colleague of mine (Nico Verhagen). The problem was that a mailmerge quick campaign has been created which should send out approximately 1500 emails. When the quickcampaign had finished, there were only 43 emails sent and nothing failed. How could that be true?Apparently only 800 contacts had an email address specified, so that already is causing half of the

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Creating an activity report which includes the related people

In an activity CRM grid, it is not possible to add attributes from the activity type (letter, phonecall etc) itself. The fields to and from on the entities phonecall, letter, fax are therefore not eligable for addition on the CRM grid. It would be very useful to see those though. The same is valid for the to, cc and bcc in email and required and optional attendees in appointments. In this post I

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Transform a table column into a CSV field in SQL Server

Imagine that you want to use a related table in your SQL query. You then must return only a single column or otherwise you'll get this SQL error:Msg 512, Level 16, State 1, Line 2Subquery returned more than 1 value. This is not permitted when the subquery follows =, !=, <, <= , >, >= or when the subquery is used as an expression.What I like to do, is to transform the result table column into a

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Determine the logged in user

Some time ago I wrote a post around how to show and hide fields based on the logged in user. Apparently this doesn't work for Dynamics CRM 4.0 anymore for two reasons. This post will help you to get it working again.The first one is that you are not allowed to use the <%= approach anymore. You do now have to use the function: Page.Response.Write(string strText);The second reason is that the

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MVP for the 3rd consecutive year

Hi Guys,As a reward for community work last year, Microsoft has again reawarded me the Microsoft CRM MVP! I am very much pleased with this award because as one of my colleagues said: Getting to the top is hard, but staying there is even harder!Last year I have spend a lot of time on doing community work again. I have spend a lot of time preparing for presentations like deepdive sessions and CRM

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UPDATE: Have a drink with your fellow CRM consultants

For quite some time I've been thinking about organizing a drink for all the Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultants in the Netherlands. Mostly I've been thinking about the format. Who should be invited, should Microsoft be a sponsor etc. From one day to another, these questions were answered by Johan van Dijk. He started the "Dynamics Netwerk Borrel". He organizes drinks for consultants who are

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Windows Home Server

Who of you guys is working with Windows Home Server (WHS)? Last weeks I've been working with this in my spare time. I've grabbed an old pc, added some harddisk space and memory and installed this product. Now I'm figuring out all of the possibilities. Of course there's the most important feature: Backup. Every night the WHS server wakes up all of my pc's and laptops and makes a backup. Once my

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Resizing windows

If you have a lot of data on an entity form, then you sometimes do want to force the page to open in full screen mode. There's a small javascript which will allow you to do this. Just add these two lines of code to the form onload of your entity form:window.moveTo(0,0);window.resizeTo(screen.availWidth, screen.availHeight);Also, when you open a custom page you can also set the window size by

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Stopping and continuing a save event

For some customizations you do need to stop the form onsave event, perform some business logic and continue the save event. An example would be that in specific conditions are met when a record is saved, then a popup will need to be shown. After filling in data in the popup and pressing a continue button on the popup, then the save operation would need to continue. The SDK helps in this situation

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Import CSV file to DataTable

I'm preparing a demo right now and for this I'm importing a CSV file to CRM. Especially the piece around the import of data from a CSV file to a DataTable is very generic. I'm sharing it with you guys for if it does make sense for you to use this as well.class CSVReader{ public System.Data.DataTable GetDataTable(string strFileName) { System.Data.OleDb.OleDbConnection conn = new

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ForceSubmit in ASP.Net

Today I've been working on a simple IFrame. This IFrame shows 3 dynamic picklists and the data in these picklists is coming from crm. Since some clients are a bit slow, I would like the picklists to be disabled while the postback is being performed. This is easily done with this script:function disableFields(field1, field2){ field1.disabled = true; field2.disabled = true;}

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Javascript and IFrames

I'm struggling with IFrames and JavaScript quite often. When you're working with this as well, the first thing to keep in mind is:Deselecte the option "restrict cross site scripting" (in dutch "Het uitvoeren van scripts tussen frames beperken")That usually saves a lot of troubles.Furthermore, the next step is to create JavaScripts. One which I use quite often, is one which allows me to access a

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VPC CRM 4.0

Just like Microsoft has developed a VPC for CRM 3.0, they have created one for CRM 4.0 as well. Here's the link to the VPC: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dd939ed9-87a5-4c13-b212-a922cc02b469&DisplayLang=en

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CrmDateTime conversion to DateTime

When working with CrmDateTime, you'll notice that this type does have a .value attribute, but the type of this attribute is string. There is no attribute to get the .net class DateTime out of your CrmDateTime. If you do want to use a DateTime anyway, you'd easily need to convert it. You could use any of these:Convert.ToDateTime(crmdatetime.Value)DateTime.Parse(crmdatetime.Value)For more

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Logo Dynamics

For a presentation I needed a logo of Microsoft Dynamics. At that point I realized that I have never used an official logo for Microsoft Dynamics. Searching on the internet resulted in this page:http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/gallery/ms-logos.mspx?FINISH=YESIt includes logo's for most Microsoft products including Visual Studio, Office, Windows and of course Dynamics.

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Dynamics CRM and NAV Integration

Many newsletters get into my mailbox and there are just a few which I read. One of them is the newsletter from my friends at Scribe. Especially in this newsletter, great news is made public. They will be releasing the NAV Adapter for Scribe Insight next month! This means that you will be able to integrate NAV with any other database or product where they do have an adapter for. Of course for

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Unable to browse for Active directory objects

While installing CRM (both CRM 3.0 as well as 4.0), you might run into the error messageUnable to browse for Active directory objectsThis error message can appear when you press "Browse" after selecting the Organizational Unit in Active Directory. There are some possible solutions which could cause this issue. Think about the following:- Are you logged in with an account to the domain instead of

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Overriddencreatedon

Everybody who's performing data imports knows the problem. When you create a record in CRM, the created on field always points at the date the record is created. Ofcourse you could go into the database and update the date by using a SQL script. But then again, there is this good white angel hanging above your shoulder whispering "Don't do it, it's not supported". No matter what this angel says,

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AttributeInfo.TypeName(int) != AttributeMetadata.Type.Name(float)

You might bump into an error message while importing an entity from a customizations file. The error show could be:Error: lead: AttributeInfo.TypeName(int) != AttributeMetadata.Type.Name(float)The cause of this error is a mismatch in attribute type. Usually a field has been removed in the other environment and has been recreated with another attribute type. The type in your destination CRM system

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Dynamics CRM 4.0 Test Data

The test data to be used in demo's etcetera is available on the Microsoft download site. Here you can find the exe and details: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D5F77EE7-3D01-4944-B5DC-C8CDC8123DF4&displaylang=en

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Failure at Microsoft.crm.setup.common.registerasyncserviceAction

Some people are experiencing troubles while installing CRM 4.0. Right now I’m having the same problems as some others. In the end of the installation, the setup throws the error message "Failure at Microsoft.crm.setup.common.registerasyncserviceAction". The reason why I got this error message was because I had just uninstalled CRM and tried to install it again. I did not think about a wise lesson

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Happy new year!

Happy new year to everybody!After a nice holiday of more than a month, I'm back in the office. Whole december I've been free and doing as least work related stuff as possible. And I have succeeded in that quite good. Except for answering some questions, helping some colleagues out, writing an article for the CRM Team Blog, giving a presentation on CRM 4.0 for my Dutch colleagues, I have not done

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