by Gustaf Westerlund | Jan 28, 2009
As some of you might have noticed, the dll:s containing the custom workflow activities might get locked and hence the compilation fails in it’s final stage.
To handle this, I tried a good program called Unlocker 1.8.7 which you can find here: http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/ – it is freeware and it will tell you which processes are locking a file and can help you kill them.
So, what is locking my dll? Well, actually several processes are involved both the MSCRMAsyncService and the IIS worker process (w3wp).
The most obvious way of handling it is just restarting the two services and that will work. However, restarting the w3wp process will require the entire CRM application to be recompiled which will create extra long and annoying waits. Instead, just recycle the applicationpool involved (CRMAppPool).
There are no problems restarting the MSCRMAsyncService.
And if you want to do it all in the pre-build event just add the following lines:
net stop “MSCRMAsyncService”
net start “MSCRMAsyncService”
cscript C:InetpubAdminScriptsadsutil.vbs stop_server W3svc/AppPools/CRMAppPool cscript C:InetpubAdminScriptsadsutil.vbs start_server W3svc/AppPools/CRMAppPool
And if you are still having problems, use the unlocker program!
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect
Logica
www.logica.com
by Gustaf Westerlund | Jan 13, 2009
Finally Microsoft have release the List Web Part for Dynamics CRM 4.0. I havn’t had the opportunity to test it yet but the previous version (for CRM 3) had problems with non-english versions of SharePoint so be aware, especially if you are running CRM and SharePoint in different base languages.
If you have any experience of it, please let me know.
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect
Logica
www.logica.com
by Gustaf Westerlund | Dec 18, 2008
How to make a workflow wait until a certain date might seem trivial but it isn’t all that clear when using the GUI, but I found a nice blog with good pictures explaining how to do it so instead of reinventing the wheel, I’ll just give you the link: http://www.askcrm.com/Default.aspx?tabid=866&EntryID=55
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect
Logica
www.logica.com
by Gustaf Westerlund | Nov 23, 2008
It’s actually an old story by now but I just recently heard of it from my new staff manager and it is a very interesting story of just how bad a CRM implementation can get. It concerns Siebel and my analysis of the story is that the reson for the crash was mostly due to bad management and a lock on both timeframe and functionallity, something I believe is impossible if you want to achieve any kind of quality. This case being the perfect example.
Please read it and leave a comment here if you want to discuss it!
http://www.cio.com/article/32228/Project_Management_AT_T_Wireless_Self_Destructs
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect
Logica
www.logica.com
by Gustaf Westerlund | Nov 19, 2008
When developing new workflow activities for CRM 4.0 you need to release the filelocks on the dll to be able to copy the new dll to the assembly directory. This can of course be done manually by restarting the service in the service manager but can be scripted into the prebuild events aswell, so that it is more automatic. Add the following two lines to the Pre-build events of your workflow activity project to make it restart the MSCRMAsyncService:
net stop “MSCRMAsyncService”
net start “MSCRMAsyncService”
Please note that you might inflict any ongoing workflows by doing this so take care if it is a live production server.
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect
Logica
www.logica.com
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