Best practices, useful Xrm Toolbox tools, and in-depth walkthroughs for CE development
Metadata is what keeps your automation, integrations, and UAT from turning into guesswork. This guide covers when to use Metadata Browser to confirm what a field really is (logical name, type, relationships, option values), and when to use Metadata Document Generator to create a shareable data dictionary for UAT/support/handoffs—so you stop answering “what field is that?” on repeat.
Customization helpers are your “make it look right + behave right” toolbox for Dynamics 365/Dataverse—forms, views, web resources, and client scripting. This guide helps you quickly find where JavaScript is registered, bulk-standardize forms and views without endless clicking, safely refactor columns/attributes, and create or document choice lists in a governed way—so you ship value without creating a haunted form that only breaks on Tuesdays. 🙂
This guide is your “show me the receipts” playbook for Dataverse/Dynamics 365 troubleshooting. When someone swears a record doesn’t exist, a view “almost works,” or a filter is only emotionally correct, you’ll use a repeatable checklist plus FetchXML Tester and Schema Browser to isolate the breaking condition, confirm the true schema/relationships, and prove the behavior with before/after evidence—without clicking around the UI like it owes you money.
Solution work is where good ALM happens—and where “Why is Prod different?” is born. This guide gives you a repeatable way to assemble deployable solutions, trace what changed with real deployment receipts, and move solution content from Dev → UAT → Prod without missing dependencies, unmanaged-layer surprises, or “oops we forgot the web resource” moments.
Security work is where you realize Dataverse isn’t “broken”—it’s just extremely literal. This guide gives you a repeatable way to diagnose “why can’t they see X?” by separating table vs record access, comparing a user to a known-good “golden user,” using role comparison to find the exact missing privilege (hello, Append/Append To), and doing safe bulk onboarding via CSV without accidentally handing out System Admin.
Auditing is how you stop arguing and start proving: who changed what, when, and what it was before—using evidence, not group chat speculation. This guide covers Audit History Extractor for bulk, report-ready audit exports (including lookup/optionset-friendly values), plus a repeatable way to validate results and produce an investigation summary clients can actually use. It also includes Environment Processes Comparer to spot process drift across environments so “Dev works, Prod doesn’t” becomes a quick diff—not a scavenger hunt.
Duplicates, loops, “works in Dev but fails in Prod,” and the dreaded lookup/choice errors — this is the Power Automate survival guide for Dataverse. You’ll get a 5-minute “stop the bleeding” checklist plus three copy/paste recipes that make flows re-run safe and production-proof.
Build It Right is a practical blueprint for keeping Dataverse/Dynamics 365 clean as it grows. It focuses on three habits that prevent long-term chaos: defining new tables with a clear “dictionary entry” (uniqueness, ownership, lifecycle, reporting needs), using predictable naming conventions so builders can find components without guessing, and choosing a solution strategy (feature-based or layer-based) that keeps ALM repeatable. If you want fewer duplicate concepts, fewer mystery fields, and deployments that don’t feel haunted—this is the pattern.
Security That Doesn’t Ruin Everyone’s Day is a practical, plain-English guide to diagnosing Dynamics 365/Dataverse security issues without turning “I can’t see it” into a two-day saga. It teaches a fast 10-minute triage (environment + exact user + one known record + test as admin vs user), a simple mental model (record access vs table privileges vs field security), and the common “gotcha” most teams miss: Append vs Append To when users can’t set lookups or relate records. It also recommends a scalable approach—personas → roles → teams—so access is repeatable instead of one-off sharing.
How to run User Acceptance Testing that actually catches issues (and doesn’t turn into chaos) is a practical UAT playbook for Dynamics 365 / Power Apps teams that need structure without overcomplicating the process. It gives two proven paths—Azure DevOps (recommended when possible) for traceability and linked Bugs/Enhancements, and Excel UAT packs for low-friction stakeholder testing—plus templates, failure-capture rules, and a repeatable workflow for turning “it didn’t work” into reproducible, trackable outcomes. The core idea: good UAT is traceable, repeatable, and actionable.
Level Up for Dynamics 365 / Power Apps is a practical guide to the browser extension features consultants actually use in real projects: Impersonation (to reproduce UAT/security issues as the user), Show All Fields (to verify hidden/internal field values), Option/Choice Values (to get the numeric codes Power Automate needs), Logical Names (for JS/query/mapping work), and Record ID + URL (for fast “receipts”). It’s essentially a “debug faster, guess less” playbook—with guardrails so the tool helps troubleshooting without bypassing governance.