Monday
Another week, another set of tickets. Well, not yet, just stuff from last week so far.
I continued where I left off last week with a ticket where a user was having an issue where if a person was logged in their portal but not into the CRM, images would not display on the page. This was down to Web Resources and the fact that you can only see Web Resources if you’re logged in. However, they use their portal with their customers who won’t have accounts on the CRM, so I needed to find a solution. That came in the form on Web Files.
I did some testing to make sure that it would all work out and I got it to work properly. Nice. Told the customer it was working and got to work writing up some documentation for them so they’ll have it for future reference. Once that was said and done, sent it off to them and closed the ticket. Easy job.
We also finished the ticket with the plugin for the items that were updating at the incorrect stages of the process. My co-worker who has access to TFS (and more experience writing extensions to Dynamics) was able to get the code working in the end, another email to the customer to tell him to verify that it’s as he requested, job done.
There was some time spent trying to get TFS set up for us afterwards, but with minimal progress. I swear, they make it purposefully difficult so you just don’t bother. Also spent some time on DLP as the rest of my tickets are just waiting customers to get back to me.
Tuesday
Well that was a whole lot of nothing. I just assigned tickets to people as the usual people who do it weren’t around for the full day today and I did some more DLP courses but that’s it. No updates to any tickets I already have and nothing new for me to work on. Though I was pretty tired today, so maybe it was a blessing, but maybe I would have woken up sooner if I actually was working on something. Oh well.
Wednesday
Still no new tickets, but I did at least do something else today. The day started off like yesterday, doing for DLP stuff, until I was told that there was some work that could be done on some of the plugins for one of the customers. Finally, something!
All there was to do for it was update the plugins to using the latest versions of the XRM SDK and I also had to update the framework target (4.6.1). So ok, not a massive challenge, but at least it’s something.
Thursday
I spent most of the day working on a plugin that is supposed to update the number of days left for a campaign for a customer when the campaign status is changed. The problem was that it wouldn’t allow the update to go through due to “The given key was not present in the dictionary”. Ok, so it’s an issue with one of the dictionaries within the system or the plugin. I mean it doesn’t really help, but I guess it’s a start?
I had a look into debugging a plugin since there wasn’t enough info given by the exception, so I talked to one of my co-workers about it and he gave me the code (still working on getting TFS setup…) and I found a video that went through the process of setting up the debugger with Visual Studio. It’s not so much debugging the live system, rather it’s debugging a recording of what just happened in the system. I could then see that it was crashing on one of the validators before it gets to calculating the days left, and it took a little bit more work to see what values it was breaking on. I think I know now.
Friday
That was a lie, I didn’t know at the time. Well, I thought I did.
I asked the customer to remove one of the notes on the record, as it had the same value as one of the previous Campaign Status Details. That didn’t help the plugin. It was only as I did the classic “Rubber-duck programming” method with Joe until I realised that all previous Campaign Status Details are stored in a subgrid in the form and there was one row that didn’t have a value in Campaign Status Details. So I asked the customer to remove that row but they didn’t get back to me today so I guess have to wait and see on Monday.
A couple of days ago I had to update the CRM DLLs that are used with one of the customer’s portals as some of the features of the previous versions are being depreciated at the end of next month, so they ask the guy with the slowest PC to do builds in Visual Studio. lmao thanks guys.
The process itself wasn’t too bad, but today I had to push the changes to the server to make the sites updated with the new files. They don’t look any different (and don’t seem to perform any different either, for better or for worse) but they should pass Microsoft’s tests now.
Until next week,
–Jamie