If you have used an attribute in a saved view in Dynamics, and the attribute is removed from the entity, you will get the following error when you try and access the view:

“I’d like my FetchXML with double quotes, please”, said no Dynamics developer, ever.

The ‘additive’ nature of CRM deployments means that it can be easier to add components to an instance of CRM than it is to remove them.

LINQPad’s Dump Containers can be used as a way of outputting some data to a static place within the output pane. A good example of this would be to display a timer or counter on the screen whilst a particular action is taking place.

On creating a new plugins project for our Dynamics 2015 organisation with the latest version of the Dynamics 365 Developer Toolkit we were experiencing all sorts of errors, either on deployment or on execution.

LINQPad contains a number of very useful utilities, as documented here. One of these is the Util.ProgressBar functionality which allows you to display the progress of your script within the results pane. This can be very useful when, say, you are updating a large number of records and want an indication of progress without having to write additional information out to the results pane for every record or group of records. Whilst the use of the ProgressBar is very straightforward, I was caught out by a very simple detail when I first started using it, so thought it worth documenting in detail here.

When writing Unit tests one can focus on two different aspects of the code under test. We can call these two types of test ‘State-based’ and ‘Interaction-based’. The first of these concentrates on the end result achieved by the code under test – ie, what was the result of the code being run, whereas the second focuses on how that result was achieved.

Our automated deployment of a CRM Solution file started failing with this error recently: 
"importjob With Id = feb7b87f-1ff9-4914-ba14-0116ca959584 Does Not Exist"
It was quite a journey to find out what was causing the error.

When trying to compile a FetchXML-based report in Visual Studio 2015 which had been developed in an earlier version of Visual Studio, we were getting the following error:

While you can’t ordinarily log in as another user through the Dynamics CRM/365 front  end, as a System Administrator it is possible to impersonate another user when making calls to the CRM API.

This is very useful if you want to be able to do the following:

• Test the correct implementation of security roles.
• Check which records can be seen by which users if sharing is being used.
• Search for charts or views belonging to different users.
• Test the behaviour of plugins when executed by users wth different security roles.