Exception while trying to execute AsyncOperationId: The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.

This error message appears when you are trying to import a file but something is going wrong. There are multiple reasons for this error message to show up. Some reasons which I found on the web include:- See if the account that your Asynchronous Service runs under can authenticate with your SQL Server Service. - If you're using multiple servers, look at something called a Service Principal Name

This time I request some help from you

And now, for something completely different. Usually, at least I hope, you can find the answer to your questions on this blog, but this time I would like to ask you guys for a favor. I’m looking for a sponsor.My little sister Iris Lemmen, 20, doesn’t share my passion for Dynamics CRM. Instead her passion is with Judo. She’s awfully good at it as she has become the Dutch champion for three times.

Close Campaign Response window

Did you ever notice that you will get an warning message when you close a new Campaign Response window? The message you will get is:Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?Your changes have not been saved. To stay on the page so that you can save your changes, click Cancel.Press OK to continue, or Cancel to stay on the current page.OK CancelYou do get this message because Microsoft

Update owner in Plugin

Here's a code snippet that will help you to update the owner of a record in a plug-in. This code should run in a POST plug-in:SecurityPrincipal assignee = new SecurityPrincipal();assignee.Type = SecurityPrincipalType.User;// PrincipalId is some known Guid belonging to the user or team that will own this record.assignee.PrincipalId = new Guid("476E234C-5E15-DE11-80BA-000C297AF856");// Create the

Links in e-mail templates

It is not so hard to get a link in a CRM template, but to hide the link behind your custom text is more difficult. It is possible to do so though. I noticed a small post in the communities by my fellow MVP Adi Katz in which he explains how you can do this. This post does deserve a bit more attention so that's why I am copying the content in this blog post. And now I can find it back as well :)Adi

Document your CRM installation

Everybody knows the importance of documentation of a project. Thanks to Merijn van Mourik and some other guys there is a tool which can help you documenting your solution. This is a free tool which you can download from Codeplex: CRM 4 documentation.If you want to use this tool on a standalone machine or a machine without internet connection, then you should download and install the following

Action Microsoft.Crm.Config.Client.InstallPstAction failed

While installing the Outlook Client, there is one error that appears to be popping up more than others:Action Microsoft.Crm.Config.Client.InstallPstAction failed.LaunchOutlookInstallerProcess failed.There are some blog posts which offer solutions to this error message. If you have this message, try the following:- Run %windir%\system32\fixmapi.exe- Reinstall the client-

Remove attributes from form which cannot be removed

There are some attributes on CRM default forms which you cannot remove. This post will show you how you can do this anyway. While doing so, please keep in mind that Microsoft must have good reasons to fix attributes on the form. Removing this might have implications, as always have a good backup ready.The steps you need to follow to remove are:- Export customizations for the specific entity-

Changing default organisation

You can change the default organisation by opening the configuration manager. In this tool you can rightclick on the organisation which you want to set as default and click "set as default". You'll see that the name of the organisation has changed to: Orgname (default).After you perform an IISReset you would expect the new default organisation to open up when you browse to your CRM server.

Change the CRMAppPool Identity

Most likely this is recorded in a thousand places, but I had a hard time finding info about what steps need to be taken to change the identity of the CrmAppPool. All you need to do is:- Create a user in Active Directory- Make sure the user has Domain User rights- Add the user to the PrivUserGroup of CRM- Make sure the user has 'log on as a service' priviledgeThe last step can be executed on two

Automatic provisioning of Organizations

Microsoft CRM does have a separate webservice for doing deployment related activities. There is a Deployment SDK especially for this webservice. You can download that here. One of the activities you can execute is automatic provisioning of new organizations. In this post I'll dive into the code required for this as well as some of the common issues while doing so.Basically following the next

Walk through all elements on a form

In some cases it is required to set all attributes on a form to disabled or do some other logic like checking which attribute has been changed. To do this you do need to walk through each attribute of the CRM form. My fellow MVP Mitch Milam has posted the technique to do this more than a year ago:http://blogs.infinite-x.net/2007/11/21/disabling-all-fields-on-a-crm-form/The most important piece of

401 Unauthorized when accessing the webservice

While there are many situations in which you can retrieve the error message 401: Unauthorized, there are some more difficult to find than others. Of course you have After you have checked the basic settings including:- Are the default credentials used- Does the user have an account in CRM- Does the user have enough priviledges in CRM- Is Windows Authentication enabled for the CRM website- Is

Hiding elements: the next evolution

One of my colleagues, Richard McCormick, has written a blog post for the Avanade internal employees. He has asked me to make this post publically available since it might be interesting for more people. Read on and get great code samples on how to hide attributes, elements and sections.Hiding Links & Controls in CRM 4 Before I go on, I should point out that this solution is technically

CRMAsyncService using 100% CPU

With one of my projects I've experienced a situation in which the CRMAsyncService is requiring 99% CPU power. Since this doesn't leave much left for CRM, we needed to get this fixed. One of my colleagues, Maarten Smid, came up with the solution of installing the Service Pack 1 for .NET 3.0. But before this can be installed, some prerequisites needed to be installed.The first step is to install

Plugin registration tools for Visual Studio 2005

The newest update of the SDK, version 4.0.8, includes updated projects for the plugin registration tool as well as the plugin developer tool. While I usually am pleased with updates, this update could cause some issues for some people. The updated projects are build in Visual Studio 2008 whereas they used to be build in Visual Studio 2005. This means that you will not be able anymore to run the

Displaying inactive records in associated view

In some situations you do want to show the inactive records in an associated view as well. My fellow MVP George Doubinski wrote an article about how to solve this by using a plugin:http://crm.georged.id.au/post/2008/03/07/Displaying-inactive-records-in-associated-view.aspx.In this post I will show that there are more routes to Rome. I've looked into the option of editing the query which is being

Read-only URL Addressable Form

The SDK does describe URL Addressable Forms, but one thing which I do miss on this page, is details around how to link to a form in readonly format. This is done by using the following URL:http://server/orgname/_forms/readonly/readonly.aspx?objTypeCode=objectTypeCode.Of course you need to change the server to servername, orgname to organization name and the objectTypeCode to the entity object

New Statement of Direction paper

Microsoft has just release a new Statement of Direction document. Due to NDA restrictions I cannot share contents of this document (yet), but assuming that you are a partner or a customer, you can download this paper yourself from either of the following locations.Partnersource: https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/marketing/statementofdirection/MD_CRM_SOD.htmCustomersource: https://

Using Advanced Find for FetchXML builder v4.0

Some time ago I have written an article about how to use the Advanced Find as FetchXML builder. Today I tried using the javascript:prompt() method on a CRM 4.0 deployment and found out that the code doesn't work anymore. This alert script does still work though.javascript:alert(resultRender.FetchXml.value);A slightly different code which might be easier to remember is:javascript:alert(

Setting the focus to a tab

Today me and a colleague worked on setting the focus of a crmForm automatically to a specific tab. After a bit of research we found that this code works:crmForm.all.tab1Tab.click();With this code in mind I looked on the internet and found that my fellow MVP Jim Wang posted that more than a year ago as well :)Anyway, it works!

CRM 4.0 Build Versions

Update: Added Rollup 3For quite a long time Aaron Elder has posted the build numbers for Dynamics CRM. Unfortunately the rollups had not been included in his list yet, though I needed to check on a system which rollup had been installed. You can check that by using the SQL Management Studio and execute the query:select * from BuildVersion"This will return the current version of CRM. When you have

Error messages in CRM

CRM does give you error messages every now and then. The message is usally in the format of "0x12345678". The numbers do not tell much, but the corresponding error message do help you definitely. These error messages are given in the SDK and on a lot of places on the internet, but there the "0x" has been removed from the error message. Here is the same list as which is listed in the SDK, but now

Microsoft Surface

Until now I've had a hard time in getting my mind around a real business case where you would be able to use the Microsoft Surface table. Today I got an email message of one of my colleagues who pointed me at a YouTube movie which does show a good business example for the Financial Market. What ideas do you have for using Surface in conjunction with CRM?

Duplicate process check

If you are creating your own integration module for CRM, then it is very wise to make sure that the process is running only once. For performance reasons you can decide to split the process in multiple threads, but running a single process multiple times can cause quite some unforseen issues.The following code snippet will allow you to check if an application with the same name is running

Use PreFiltering in Reports downloaded through Webservice

In my previous post I discussed a Mail-merge alternative: Reports exporting to Word files. The reports downloaded in that approach do not support any pre filtering as CRM reports would allow you to set. It would be great if that can be set as well. This post describes how to do that.The reports created in CRM or for CRM do support the prefiltering. In custom created reports this is added by

Mail-merge alternative: Reports exporting to Word files

CRM 4.0 does offer a lot of new features regarding mail merge, but not all situations are supported by the new features. You can look into 3rd party tools like C360 / MSCRM-Addons or Temptus Wordconnect, but a totally different approach is to use the Reporting Services. This post will dive into how to use Reporting Services to generate word documents.You can create any report in CRM by using the

Log In Name and Password required by Report Server

You can view the CRM reports in Reporting Services by browsing to http://YourReportingServer/ReportServer/. There you should select your organization, select 4.0 and select a report. At that moment you might be asked for a Log In Name and a Password as seen in the image.This behavior appears when you have installed the SRS Data Connector because your deployment contains a separate server for SQL.