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User 21

Yet Another Technology Explorer

Dynamics CRM 4.0 VPC: Fixing the broken Customer and Partner PortalsJuly 16

So you’ve spent a few hours downloading the latest re-released VPC of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 only to find that the Customer Portal and Partner Portal samples are broken.

For example, when you try to launch the Partner Portal (under xRM Portals in IE favorites bar) you get the following message:

I’m certain Microsoft will post a fix soon but in the mean time I’ve done some digging and found a solution. The portal files are already deployed and you just need to point the IIS applications to the correct folders on your disk.

On your VPC desktop you’ll find a shortcut named “Accelerators”, open it and you’ll find oyur portals.

Open IIS management console.

Right click “Partner Portal” and select Properties.

Under the Home Directory tab paste this path:

Click Apply.

Now do the same for the “Partner Portal” application, the path is: C:\Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0\Accelerators\CUSTOMER_PORTAL_RTW_R1\Installation\Website\Customer-Portal-R2\Website

Hope this helps.

So you’ve spent half a day downloading the latest re-released VPC of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 only to find that the Customer Portal and Partner Portal samples are broken.

For example, when you try to launch the Partner Portal (under xRM Portals in IE favorites bar) you get the following er

The operation completed successfully, please tell Microsoft about this problemNovember 4 2009

I think by now I already installed Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 at least 4 or 5 times but today was the first time I encountered this message:

In reality, VS2010 installed successfully though there was some failure installing the Silverlight SDK. I would expect this sort of result to be conveyed differently, hopefully this would change for the RTM version.

Still had a good laugh though.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer Toolkit Stores Passwords in Plain TextNovember 2 2009

If you’re using Dynamics CRM Developer Toolkit it’s worth noting that when you specify a username and password in the Server Connection settings (CRM Explorer Options in Visual Studio) the password is stored in the registry in plain text.

The password is stored in the following registry path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\DialogPage\
UKDynamics.CrmExplorer.OptionsPageCustom

This may not be a big issue for many developers, even when an administrator user is used, since most developers usually know the administrator password or are administrators themselves at least on dev\test environments, but still this is something you should be aware of.

If you’re concerned about this and cannot connect to your CRM server using default credentials, you can simply leave the password field blank and switch to default credentials every time you’re done working with the too

Google Israel – Now Availbale in ArabicMarch 2 2009

Just noticed this: Google Israel (google.co.il) is now localized into Arabic, as well as Hebrew.

“Share on Friendfeed” Plugin for RSS BanditJanuary 25 2009

Personally I prefer using RSS readers which come in the form of client applications rather than online services. My favorite for many years was Omea Reader but unfortunately ever since JetBrains stopped working on it and made it open source, the product development is simply stuck. Combined with a few annoying bugs, I am gradually pushed towards looking for a replacement.

I haven’t settled on anything yet but lately I decided to give RSS Bandit another try. So, while working with it I thought it would be nice to add a “Share on Friendfeed” functionality. RSS Bandit supports the IBlogExtension plugin interface, and following Dare Obasanjo’s del.icio.us sample made it very easy to develop a Friendfeed plugin.

The IBlogExtension framework is supported by other RSS aggregators so this plugin may work with other applications but I only tested it with RSS Bandit. Let me know if you successfully use it with other apps.

Download and Installation

Share on Friendfeed Plugin (12Kb)

1. Download and unzip the plugin to RSS Bandit’s plugins