Merry Christmas!

Everybody, Thanks for reading this blog another year long. Now its time for me to stop working this year. We just won a nice new project, the MS CRM Outlook V3C has just been released and so it is time to start a great holiday. I'll spend a lot of time with my friends, family and above all my wonderfull girlfriend.I wish you all a very good time around both christmas and new year. I hope you can

Filter data in a CRM lookup field

Curt Spanburgh posted this message on the Sandbox: Custom Lookup Dialog for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.In this post he describes that it is possible to filter the data in a lookup box. He also gives an example which uses data on the form to filter the lookup data. For testing purposes I have used the code below. It should be placed in the form onload of the account entity. It does filter the lookup

Developing on multiple VPC's

Hi guys,I'm wondering what technologies you're using for developing CRM projects. Especially when you have multiple clients..Personally I use virtual machines via Virtual PC. Each PC is about 10 gb huge though. So I was looking around on the internet and I found a good solution to that. Now this is what I do:- Create one VPC which has Windows Server 2003, MSSQL, CRM, Sharepoint, Office, Visual

Set a default entity on a lookup window

In case you have more entities to chose from on a lookup window, then you might want to be able to set the default for this lookup. For instance, the regarding field on an activity entity like letter, email and fax does support multiple entities. If you want this to default set to contact, then use this javascript on the form onload://set defaultcrmForm.all.regardingobjectid.defaulttype = "2";

Maximum amount of records in Excel export

I'm very busy at the moment (just like you all probably), so just a small post. The default for the Excel export is a maximum of 10.000 records. If you need to export more, then you'd need to modify a registery setting. Follow the next steps to achieve this:- Start Regedit- Navigate to HKLMachine\Software\Microsoft\MSCRM- Create a new DWORD value named 'maxrecordsforexporttoexcel'- Give the new

Clear BizTalk Messagebox

Since the release of the CRM - BizTalk connector, you're all doing integrations right? Did it happen to you that you start a BizTalk application one evening and in the morning your messagebox is filled with more then 100.000 instances? If that is the case, then you can delete these by using the BizTalk Administration console. Unfortunately this will take hours and hours..Instead, running this

Reporting services on another machine

The database server doesn't have to be running on the same server as the CRM application itself. If you follow the installation guide, then everything should work fine. But... Avanade has done this for several clients and sometimes it appears that the reporting might not work. The error message will be:“An error has occurred. For more information, contact your system administrator”or"error 401 –

Microsoft CRM for Enterprise Organizations

Microsoft started putting Microsoft CRM into the market as an application for Small and Medium sized businesses. This didn't stop us from Avanade and also other partners to use this application in larger and even enterprise businesses. With the release of Microsoft CRM 3.0, the application is really Enterprise ready.Avanade is the trusted advisor that customers depend on to deliver a successful

Using the Advanced Find for FetchXML builder

Some time ago I talked about the program "FetchXML builder" to build FetchXML queries: http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2006/09/fetchxml-builder.html, but take a look at the next solution.You can just open the Advanced find page and build the query as you like. Then run the query to see if it returns the data as you wish it should. If you are satisfied with the results and you want to know what

Error: Deletion Service failed to clean up some tables

Some people have been experiencing the following error message in the event log:Event Type: ErrorEvent Source: MSCRMDeletionServiceEvent Category: NoneEvent ID: 16387Date: DateTime: TimeAM User: N/AComputer: Computer_NameDescription:Error: Deletion Service failed to clean up some tables.Microsoft has a solution for this message. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/921391/EN-US/ for their

MSCRM Mobile Applications

Microsoft does offer 2 different applications for the mobile devices. These are the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Mobile client (in short the CRM Mobile client) and the CRM Mobile Express for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 (Mobile Express client). Next to these two applications there is the CWR Mobility's Mobile CRM client (CWR Mobile client). Now which application to use?Lets look at the descriptions

Enable or disable advanced find feature on attributes

Did you know that you can set each attribute of each entity to be able for advanced find or not?By doing this you can specify which fields the users can search on. That means that all the fields which you do not use in your CRM system can be removed from the list to make using the advanced find easier.So how do you do this? Just:- go to system- customizations- customize entities- select any

Accessing webservices via Javascript (aka AJAX)

Several times I've been asked, or saw the question on the newsgroups, how to create a piece of javascript code which retrieves data from a webservice. This information has been included in the SDK and you'll be able to find it here:http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/CrmSdk3_0/htm/v3d0accessingwebservices.aspHere's the code example of that page:// Declare

Clone your production system: VMware Converter 3.0

Imagine you have a problem on your production server. You try to reproduce the error on your dev, test and acceptance servers and they all work fine... Now what? How do you solve this? I really don't like to debug errors on the production machine..VMware has the solution! They have created a free Physical to Virtual Convertion tool which does not require your server to go offline! They're

BizTalk Adapter available for download!

It's been some time waiting since the announcement at the Convergence in Texas for the BizTalk Adapter to be released, but it has gone public! Here are links to the adapter and a code sample:The adapterCode SampleThis BizTalk connector basically exposes all the CRM API's in BizTalk. For each entity schemas can be generated. The adapter can perform Create, Update, Delete or Execute actions based

Determine which priviledges are required

I do assume that you do not provide the end user administrator rights on the crm installation. You probably have defined your own security role with the least priviledges the user should posess. Well how do you know what priviledges the user should posess?There's an update to the online SDK with this information. You can browse to this url and you'll see a list of messages. Under each message the

FetchXML Builder

Some time ago Microsoft organized the code contest. Users have been asked to share their greatest assets with the community. One of the winners is James Downey. He has created the FetchXML Builder: a free user-friendly tool for building and testing FetchXML statements.Today I have been able to use this tool in my development project. It works very intuitive, at least for people having fetchxml

Convergence EMEA 2006

March this year I didn't make it to the Convergence in Texas. But I'll be attending the Convergence in Munich (6-8 November)! Let me know if I can meet you there. I'll assist the MS teams at the Community Lounge and Microsoft “Ask The Expert” Pavillion.What is Convergence 2006 EMEA?Convergence EMEA is the Microsoft Dynamics premier event, to bring customers, partners, team members and industry

Reporting PreFilter

Right now I'm digging into reports more and more. I have encountered some troubles and here are some hands on experience tips.Getting startedSo... I want a report. What now?First of all go to this url: http://www.microsoft.com/dynamics/crm/using/customizing/reporttutorial.mspxYou'll find a tutorial here named "Create a report in 15 minutes or less". This is the place to start.Then take a look at

Stop using VS 2003 and start using VS 2005 for CRM Development

Most of the development for MS CRM v3.0 I do in Visual Studio 2003. This is because callouts needs to be built on .NET Framework v1.1. All the projects built with Visual Studio are .NET Framework v2.0. Since I dont want to switch between several IDE's all the time, I only use VS 2003.Today is the day that I found a very interesting blog posting of Arash. See this post for information on how to

Search

Hi,Earlier this week I removed the popups from this page, now I have added a useful functionality. If you know for sure that I wrote an article about something, then just search for the words you remember. The textbox on the right side will only search this blog.So far about searching the blog. Now something about searching in CRM.Do you know on which fields of the entity the quick search is

No more popups!

At least, on this blog...I've been using Nedstat for sitestatistics from the start of this blog. They have been taken-over by webstats4u.com. I didn't mind that much, but ever since there have been appearing popups on the blog. Now I'm running google analytics on the blog. They give a lot nicer reports and they do that without popups! Have fun with the improved user experience :)See here a

Optimize MS CRM webservice

Currently I'm working on an import program. I have to import thousands and thousands of records. Usually the crm system is quite fast, but with these huge loads, I'm getting quite anoyed by the performance of the MS CRM webservice. It even causes error messages like "The underlying connection was closed: Unable to connect to the remote server.". Now there are some performance tweaks available. I

Fetch all records

Have you ever tried to write a code which will get you all records from a specific entity? It's harder then you think it is! Everybody who is a bit aware of the CRM SDK thinks it should be a fetch statement like this:

Save disabled fields

Hi!I was reading a posting of Ben Vollmer about "Doing Math in Microsoft CRM aka Calculated Field". This is an interesting article, but I noticed something in the posting that I did not know yet. There is a possibility to submit fields which are disabled! I have been using calculated fields before, but I always enabled the field when submitting the page.So what is the solution? The use of the

MS CRM Live, open-source client for mobile devices and BizTalk integration

Today at the Worldwide Partner Conference 2006 in Boston, Microsoft has reveiled new information regarding CRM. Take a look at the press release for information regarding the the MS Dynamics CRM Live service, an open-source client for mobile devices and the BizTalk Server-based integration. Press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/jul06/07-11CRMLivePR.mspxI'm looking forward

New MVP's

The new Dynamics MVP's are announced:Great PlainsDuke DelPradoRichard WhaleyBrenner KlenzmanCRMRonald LemmenFrank LeeNavisionAhmed AminiAlain KrikilionSolomonToni SavageLet's congratulate them all!!And yes, I have noticed that my name is in that list as well :) Thanks Matt Parks for nominating!!Update:I've added my profile to the mvp website. Click here to find me

Fix alpahabet bar in Dutch CRM

The Dutch version of CRM has a nice bug. The alphabet bar looks like:A B C D E F G H I K K L M N O P Q R S T U V W x Y ZAs you can see, there are two bugs. The first one is the double K and the second is the lowercase x. This has finally been fixed! They are still working on the kb article pages, but you can request the fix. The KB article is: 919358. In case you can read french or italian, look

Modifying the fullname

The fullname of a contact is always "firstname lastname". Right? Well, did you know that you can modify this? Go to Settings, System Settings. There you can modify this setting to some other options!Great :) So lets modify the fullname to "lastname, firstname". When saving this setting, CRM warns you that this only works for the new entities and not for the existing entities. If this really is a

CrmException: Exception of type Microsoft.Crm.CrmException was thrown

Time for a new fix for a common problem.When uploading a report you might get an error message. If this error message is:NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.SRSReport.convertDataSource(CrmContext context) +115Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.SRSReport..ctor(String name, String description, String xmlContent, String showin, String

File or assembly name Microsoft.Crm.MetadataService, or one of its dependencies, was not found

Imagine.. You're writing a wonderful MS CRM 3.0 addon. After writing lines and lines of code, the time is there to run and test the addon. Instead of seeing your fantasic, state-of-the-art, rocket-science, cutting-edge addon, it is this message that arises:Parser Error Message: File or assembly name Microsoft.Crm.MetadataService, or one of its dependencies, was not found.Great.Now how to solve

Reporting Server not on MSCRM webserver?

If you have Reporting Server installed on a different server, then you should definately read this document:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=51bf9f20-bd00-4759-8378-b38eefda7b99&DisplayLang=enThis will help you to get Reporting to work again.Happy reporting!

Callout debug: Access is Denied

I'm not sure if more people are experiencing the same thing, but at least I'd like to share this information with you.After creating a debug build of a callout, I do copy the dll and pdb files to the \Microsoft CRM\Server\bin\assembly folder. Now I can normally debug the callout. But after modifying the code and copying the files again, then I cannot step into the code. CRM just steps over the

Add descriptions to relationship view

When working with relationships, you will find out that it would be useful to add the fields "Description 1" and "Description 2" to the associated view. This means that when you're in the account detail page and you view the associated relationships, that you will not only see "Party 1", "Role 1", "Role 2" and "Party 2". The description fields are useful to store additional information, but it

10.000 Visitors

After 10.5 months of blogging, 50 posts after the "hello world" posting, this blog has been grown to what I hoped it would be. A place to find interesting information regarding MS CRM with a personal touch. Obviously this is being appreciated by the CRM community because as of this day I have had over 10.000 visitors! Thanks to all of you!

Finally there: Show and hide fields based on the users role!

Hi all,I've been posting around showing and hiding fields more often. I won't be talking about that now, instead I'll be discussing the ability to perform JavaScript coding based on the users role.This solution is very neat and very clean, though unsupported!!! Now... Let's get started and dig into this.MS CRM has a lot of Javascript codes delivered with the product. One of these codes is located

Hide and show fields based on the logged in user

There have been a lot of requests on how to hide and show fields since my earlier postings regarding hiding and showing fields and rows. John Straumann has written an article about this before. A working solution, but not too nice though.Here's another solution which is unsupported (ofcourse ;) ), but it gives you a lot more freedom.So how to tackle this problem. We already know how to hide and

Dynamics vision of Bill Gates

Unfortunately I didn't make it to the Convergence 2006. Luckily there are other ways to get the same information as what is given there. Microsoft has posted an article on PressPass regarding Bill's vision for the new generation of Business Solutions that enable people-ready business.Read the article here.Most important is that Bill outlined five key and unique pillars to Microsoft's approach to

Article in .NET Magazine #12

Together with Sahin Ozdemir, one of my direct colleages, I have written an article regarding MS CRM 3.0 for the nr 1 Microsoft Developer magazine in the netherlands: .NET Magazine. Ofcourse all the Dutch readers already have a free (yeah, Dutch people love free things) subscription, otherwise get one now at: http://www.microsoft.nl/magazine !Back to the topic. We wrote an article, in Dutch, for

CRM Blog world

Wonderfull thing blogging. I'm doing this now for more then half a year and still am having fun to continue. But more and more blogs are coming up. There's a huge list now of people blogging mostly about MS CRM. So where is this list? Everyone has got some other blogs on their blogroll, but there is no full list. Well. Here's a list of what I think is the complete list of MS CRM blogs at the

MS CRM SDK 3.0.4

Microsoft posted the newest version of the SDK for MS CRM 3.0 yesterday. We're on version 3.0.4 now.Download the SDK here.OverviewThe Microsoft CRM 3.0 SDK is for developers, system customizers and report writers. It contains the following sections:Server Programming Guide – A guide for developers writing server side code, custom business logic, integration modules, workflow assemblies and more.

Hiding rows

Hi!Have you already tried to remove fields as described in this article?I've been using this quite some time now, but I noticed something weird. When you have removed two fields which are on the same line, then you don't want to see this row at all. Well, this doesn't work by default.By using jscript you'll need to access the table row and hide it. This doesnt work with the style.visibility = '

Readonly fields

Ryan Farley has written a nice article about making fields readonly. Ryan has written several good articles from a developers point of view. I expect there will be more good work coming from his hands. Welcome in the world of CRM bloggers Ryan!

Wintersport

It's been a while since my last posting. Well, for that I do have a good reason. I've been in France, Alpe d'Huez, for a week for winter holidays. Until the day before my holidays I didn't know for sure if I could go on holidays because of a high priority CRM project. Luckily for me the project has been delayed and so I have been snowboarding a week long!I've been back for several days now but

How to rename area's

Quite often I see the question "how do I rename an area in CRM v3.0?".I could write an own example, but Arne Janning already did so in the public community. Here's his post:In the CRM-web-client click --> Settings --> Customization --> Export Customizations --> mark Site Map --> More Actions --> Export Selected Customizations --> Hit OK on the dumb dialog.You get a customizations.xml-file to

Getting inside MS CRM

If you think that solutions which are on this blog are unsupported, then take a look at the post which my new German colleague Arne Janning has posted:Getting inside Microsoft CRM - Part IHe'll get you virtually inside crm and from there you will be able to do anything that you have ever wanted to do with MS CRM.I'll have to warn you: if you don't feel comfortable with what you see, then just

MBS turns profitable

The Microsoft Business Solutions (Dynamics) group has made profit for the first time. The group posted an operating profit of $10 million vs. a loss of $17 million for the same quarter in the prior year.Read the full Techweb article here.

MS CRM 3.0 trial download

You can now download MS CRM 3.0 for a 90 day trial in each language in which Microsoft CRM is available! The page will be updated with new languages as they are released. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d418781-69ad-422d-92fa-87fdb2538e2c&DisplayLang=enThanks to John for the information :)

Hide a form field

Now that each field offers an OnChange event, we want to use it. At least I do. Based on the selection or values in another field, I'm disabling fields all over the screen. But why disabling and not hide them?! It's not documented and therefore not supported, but it sometimes is needed. The code to hide a field is:crmForm.all.name_c.style.visibility = 'hidden';crmForm.all.name_d.style.visibility

Add dates programmatically to CRM

Does that word actually exist in English? Programmatically?Anyway. When you're working on a program which uses the SDK to add or modify data in CRM, then you will find out that there is not much documentation about how to use this data. And when you enter wrong data to CRM, then the error message doesn't help you much either: 0x80040216 An unexpected error occurred.Well. Here are 2 code examples

Quick create export functionality

Serveral of my customers are asking for an export functionality to Excel or CSV. Have you ever experienced that? If so, how did you create that?Let me tell you my solution. MS CRM 3.0 does offer SQL Reporting Services for Reporting. The reports which are generated can be exported to Excel and CSV. With a little bit of tuning, you can even render a report into one of these formats, without

You definately need this for a demo!

Hi all,Last weeks I've been giving some demo's. When a prospect would like to see a demo, then ofcouse I create a demo (in a virtual machine) in which they can recognize themselves. Every client has their own requirements and therefore require an own VPC. I used to use a simple VPC which has Windows 2003, SQL server 2000 and CRM 3.0 and extend this default image for every demo.But now I have

New MVP's!

Today I heard that there are new MS Dynamics CRM MVP awardees. One of my direct colleagues has obtained this award! Please join me in congratulating Rob Bakkers with this outstanding accomplishment!Find out more about the MS Dyn. MVP's here: https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvplist.aspx?Product=Microsoft+Dynamics+CRM