Helpful Tools

The purpose of this post isn’t to cover popular tools such as Fetch XML Builder or the Ribbon Workbench but tools that are perhaps less known and free to use.

I plan to keep adding to this post as I discover usual tools

For Dynamics 365 Development

Publishing JavaScript Web Resources locally

To avoid overwriting fellow developers changes to JS files in a shared D365 developer environment, developers can test their JS changes locally before publishing to D365. A couple of options to do this are:

  • Fiddler Classic
  • Google Chrome’s override feature

Publishing JavaScript Web Resources to Dynamics 365

To deploy JS to the Dynamics 365 server, a couple of options are:

  • The Visual Studio extension ‘Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Web Resources Updater’ by Marat Deyhun
  • The XrmToolBox plugin ‘WebResources Manager’ by MscrmTools

Creating Entity Based Diagrams

To ensure there are no redundant relationships between entities, an entity based diagram can be produced by using the following tool:

  • The XrmToolBox plugin ‘Entity Relation Diagram Creator’ by Bas van de Sande

Also, to create UML diagrams to use in Architectural documents, the following tools can be used:

To generate a plantUML file:

  • The XrmToolBox plugin ‘UML Diagram Generator’ by Jonas Rapp

To view the generated plantUML file:

  • The Visual Studio extension ‘PlantUml Language Service’ by Kieran Borsden

Creating SSRS Reports

To create SSRS reports in Visual Studio

  • The Visual Studio extension ‘Microsoft Reporting Services Projects’