I was working on an Azure Function today, and the normal “Publish” option in Visual Studio was unavailable to me. So I needed to figure out another way to publish the function. It is quite a simple process to do through the Azure Portal User Interface. Here is a quick guide on how to do it through the portal.
Creating Azure Functions
Azure Functions are a great way of running “serverless” code.
What is serverless code, and what would I use it for? How do I set it up?
Dynamics 365 Retrieve Multiple - Unknown Condition Operator:DoesNotContain
Today; I was making a small console app to anonymise the data we had in our development CRM environment and ran into an unexpected issue. I was attempting to pull in some contact data from CRM that needed to match some basic criteria: “Last Name Does Not Contain ‘Service’”. I did a basic retrieve multiple query and got the error: “Unknown Condition Operator: DoesNotContain”.
Disable JavaScript Debugging in Visual Studio
If you are reading this, it is likely that when you are debugging your ASP.NET application your Visual Studio is inserting itself to handle your JavaScript debugging. While I can see the usefulness of this feature; it can become annoying as each time you start a new instance of your application Visual Studio opens a new instance of Chrome to handle the JavaScript debugging.
Adding a Service User to Dynamics 365
A service user is a system user within Dynamics 365 that is used to perform automated operations. In order to carry out any operations in Dynamics 365 you need to be authenticated to the system. Previously this had meant consuming a Dynamics 365 license on a user that is not used in the user interface in any capacity and only interacted with the system via the web services. More recently Microsoft has added two different types of users that can perform these tasks without consuming a Dynamics 365 license.
Getting Started with the Bot Framework
Microsoft have put a lot of time and effort into creating a framework to easily create a bot across multiple channels. This means you don’t have to spend any time tailoring your bot to specific channels for consumption.
I will show you what this means, and how you can get started with the bot framework in minutes.
Adding Application Insights to an Existing Web Application
If you don’t know what it is; Application Insights is essentially a Microsoft developed framework for logging and capturing events. It can give you some incredibly useful data on your web application, and as at the writing of this blog post it is free for usage under 1gb per month; here is a quick run-through of how to add it to your existing web application.
Switching to a Password Manager
Security concepts and secure passwords have been drilled into me so much that I am almost fatigued by them. For the longest time I knew that I needed to switch to a password manager rather than the 2 - 3 passwords that got used between the many sites that I have signed up to. After seeing so many breaches of popular sites I finally moved to using a password manager this week, and thought I would share some of my learnings. In my household; I definitely found that small steps worked in making the password manager become part of the normal process.
Timeout more than the maximum 31 days in a CRM workflow
When you are creating a workflow in CRM, you often have the need to make it wait for a certain time before you want to continue with the rest of the steps in the workflow.
You can do this by adding a Wait Condition. There are some limitations to the Wait Condition however. You can only wait 1 - 59 Minutes, 1 - 23 Hours, 1 - 31 Days, or 1 - 24 Months. You can get what you need most of the time from these values, but what happens when you can’t? What if you need to wait 40 Days exactly? Or 6 Weeks exactly, or another value that cannot be made from the given options?
Visual Studio Ignoring your .gitignore?
If you are reading this, it is likely that your Visual Studio is not picking up that you don’t want some files/folders going to your repository.
There can be a couple of reasons for this, which we will go over to make sure it is working.
The first thing to do is to ensure that your syntax is actually correct. Have a look at the git documentation to make sure you are doing it right.
If you are sill having an issue, then it is likely to be caused by the ms-persist.xml
Try the following:
- Close Visual Studio.
- Navigate to your .git folder
- Delete ms-persist.xml
- Restart Visual Studio
After restarting Visual Studio, you should see that Visual Studio is now respecting your git ignore file.