When you are amid a pesky IT issue, it can be difficult determining whether the problem is down to a bug/system fault or human error. Like this recent example involving Azure Data Factory illustrates, it is generally best to assume the latter, to avoid any prolonged difficulty.
Sometimes in IT, you can hit a brick wall when working with something outside of your comfort zone. When this occurs within a personal testing environment, then it also means that resolving errors, such as IP address assignment for the Windows Server Routing and Remote Access service, can be somewhat challenging…
The ability to consume Application Insights data from directly within Power BI is an excellent feature in what is already a pretty outstanding product. However, there will likely be some steps that you have to follow to ensure that your reporting solution is secured, using an appropriately privileged API key.
We saw a few weeks ago how to utilise Azure Active Directory (AAD) Security Groups to manage Azure SQL database access at scale. When using this feature, you must ensure database changes are deployed out using an AAD administrator account or similar, a task which may be difficult to achieve in an Azure DevOps Pipeline.
Having the ability to straightforwardly obtain a records Globally Unique Identifier after programmatically creating it within Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement can help significantly with data integration requirements. This is a relatively easy task when working with the Web API using JScript but less so if C# is your language of choice...
Azure SQL Server has long supported the ability to use Azure Active Directory user accounts to access and work with databases. What you may not know is that it is also possible to add users via membership of a security group, a feature which, I believe, is incredibly useful for managing large-scale deployments.
The Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement/Common Data Service connector for Azure Data Factory can, in most cases, fit into your data integration needs. However, it is worth highlighting the two field types which are, specifically, not supported; namely, the Customer and Owner field types.
By default, the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement connector for Azure Data Factory V2 exposes a predefined list of fields, that must have data mapped to them for any Copy Data task to complete successfully. This behaviour can be impractical depending on your particular scenario; fortunately, there is a way in which you can override this.
Feature deprecations can often cause some degree of disruption, especially if they involve custom code. Microsoft has recently deprecated the Xrm.Page object for JScript form functions in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. Find out more about this change and what you will need to do to fix this as part of this week's blog post.
Azure Data Factory V2 not just has 1, but three separate connectors that all claim to hook up to Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement/Dynamics CRM! So which connector is the "right" one to use and what differences do they have? With a little help from Alan Partridge, we can clear up any confusion...