Company Blog Development

In one of our recent requirements, we had to log changes to certain fields in a few different entities. Since we needed the value of the field before and after the change, the logical option was to use plugins and adding a pre-image step to it in order to save that data.

To start the year, I would like to review Adaptive Cards, where last summer I had a Power Storm session with a couple of my fellow MVPs, Alex Shlega and Linn Zaw Win to get a little more familiarized with using Adaptive Cards, adding them to Cloud flows and Microsoft Teams, and sending adaptive cards via Outlook. About 5 months passed since then, and now I had the need to build something for a project that I am working on.

There are various organizations that for whatever reason, whether it be trust or security are not comfortable using the Microsoft-hosted agents, and would like to use self-hosted agents within their own corporate environment.

In this article, I will go through the steps of creating a self-hosted agent, and then configuring a pipeline that will move your solution between the different environments.

Recently, while working on a project that needed to update the Exchange rates in CDS, I was tasked at finding a solution that would be able to retrieve data from a SQL Server hosted on an Azure Virtual Machine. There were so many different approaches, and security was the main one, but I decided to do a deep dive and testing out how Power Automate will be able to accommodate these requests.

I have been working in the Government space for a few years now, and most implementations of the Dynamics and Azure tenants and environments are hosted in the Government Cloud. This means that there are a lot of restrictions that we have to deal with, not only from Microsoft but also from the internal IT policies.

Last Friday, while working with one of our clients on an integration issue between Dynamics and the Microsoft Exchange global address book, he asked me if there was a way for them to have automated creation of events (calendar items) in their Microsoft Outlook calendar where the source of the data was an Excel spreadsheet in OneDrive. This is a short post, but might help someone out who needs to implement this.

In this blog post I will demonstrate how to use Azure Service Bus and a Listener application to integrate between the Common Data Service (Dynamics 365 or Power Apps Model Driven Application) and an On Premise SQL Service database.

It has been quite some time since Microsoft announced the use of oAuth to connect between Server environments, but many organizations are still using username and password to connect to Dynamics 365 or the Command Data Service (CDS).

I recently had to work on a migration project, and while this customer was using legacy credentials to authenticate, they had no problems doing so with all of their environments. After they provisioned a new environment, suddenly they started receiving authentication exceptions from their data migration tool (using Kingswaysoft and SSIS).

In many of the projects that I have worked over the past years, either government of private sector, while working with other businesses it has become a common practice to request that Industry information from the companies that you work with, and furthermore the NAICS code. While not every company knows their NAICS code, drilling down to get it using the Industry (2-digit code), Subsector (4-digit code) and NAICS title (6-digit code) might be the way to go, sometimes you might want to bypass this complex search if you know ahead of time your business’ NAICS code and have it auto populated for you.

Recently, I published a blog post on creating a PowerApp that validates a Credit Card number, and displays the correct image next to the card based on the Card number. As my first PowerApps Component Framework application, I took the same logic of the PowerApp that I created, and decided to create a PCF control that will do the same. I have also created a training guide for this, so that you can follow this logic step by step, which you can download at the bottom of this post.