Unicode conversion

When writing javascripts with alerts or similar when not working with english, special characters like the swedish åäö might not be shown correctly. I found this helpful page where you can enter the string you want to convert and then copy paste the result. Simple and nice.

http://rishida.net/scripts/uniview/conversion.php

Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect

Logica
www.logica.com

Really cool way of getting FetchXML from advanced find

I’ve been having some problems with my blogs in Outlook but today I fixed it and started checked if there was anything special and found this very interesting article on Ronald Lemmens blog.
http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2009/02/using-advanced-find-for-fetchxml.html

He describes how to, without any code or customizations to a system, easily get the fetchxml code from an advanced find by just putting some javascriptcode in the url of the window. Beautiful in all it simplicity!

Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect

Logica
www.logica.com

Workflow activity development and file locking

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

List Web Part for Dynamics CRM 4.0

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

AT&T Wireless self destructs…

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