Dynamics 365 Tooling

Brent Howard

• 2 min read
Dynamics 365 Tooling

This won't be a comprehensive list, it is more about what I use day to day. That said I am keen to hear if there are any that I have missed that I should be using.

  1. First things first, XrmToolbox. It is a non start without this amazing suite of tools. This was built by Tanguy Touzard and has an established communitity behind it developing an array of plugins.

Download: https://www.xrmtoolbox.com/

Once you have it downloaded and extracted I would recommend as a minimum the following plugins.

  • Early Bound Generator
  • FetchXML Builder
  • Metadata Document Generator
  • Plugin Registration
  • Plugin Trace Viewer
  • Ribbon Workbench 2016
  • View Layout Replicator
  • Webresources Manager

There are pleanty more and it should be your first point of call when trying to do something. Chances are if you need to do it someone else has had to as well.

  1. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CE Tools, are available for download via NuGet. This includes tools that used to be in the SDK.
  • Code Gneration
  • Configuration Migraiton
  • Package Deployer
  • Plug-in Registration
  • Solution Packager

Microsoft have a powershell script you can use to download and extract the tools.

Download: https://docs.microsoft.com

  1. Level up for Dynamics CRM/365, is an extension for Chrome to do some awesome in browser. Some of the big ones for me are
  • Logical Names |
  • God Mode
  • Record Properties
  • Record URL
  • Record ID
  • Show Optionset Values

There are a heap more it can do which you can check out at https://github.com/rajyraman/Levelup-for-Dynamics-CRM

Download: Chrome Web Store

  1. D365 Developer Extensions, is an extention for Visual Studio 2015 / 2017 and it allows to download, develop and deploy web resources from within Visual Studio as well as 1 click deploy of plug-ins as well as some templates.

Download: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/

  1. CRM REST Builder, is another awesome tool for the belt from Jason Lattimer. It is a solution you can import into Dynamics 365 which allows you to build the JavaScript web requests using either the 2011 or Wab API endpoints.

This solution will save your hair and make you not completely hate the client side Web Api and all it's qwerks.

For more information check out Jason Lattimers Github https://github.com/jlattimer/CRMRESTBuilder

Download: https://github.com/jlattimer/CRMRESTBuilder/releases

As I said, if there are any that i have missed let me know. I will continue to update this as I find others.

Cheers,
Brent