How my tools for Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform came about: what problem was behind them, how I worked around it before, what I built and what went wrong. No product prose, but dates and mistakes with dates attached.
Two days after the first version, Translation Studio ran against a real environment. Three assumptions did not hold, exporting the core solution took almost three minutes, and the first import reported an error although it went through. Above all, the customer asked for a way to translate that does not look like a table. That became the designer.
Dataverse keeps every label per language. If a translation is missing, French users see English field names. The standard way to fix that is an export to Excel with thousands of rows and no filter for “missing”. Translation Studio reads the same export, shows only the gaps and writes it back filled in.
Booking tile, resource cell and colors of a schedule board used to be visible only after saving, in the board. Part two: a designer with live preview, four hundred pixels missing in the Power Apps host, a builder instead of HTML, and an export that turns identifiers back into names.
A tab in the schedule board is a record with a JSON and three references. Microsoft's tool copies it and loses the references. Part one: copying with everything that belongs to it, editing without JSON, four boards with one filter layout, and why a filter field filters nothing.
I used the Configuration Migration Tool on every project and liked it on none. The fourth part is about the Data Transfer Hub, which was built in one day with 37 commits, about the OData Browser, and about what it took for the console to go to other customers.
In July the questions from operations arrived. Plugin errors nobody sees. Security roles whose effect nobody can state with certainty. Flows that are off in PROD, and nobody knows since when. Plus a dual-write version that had been displayed wrong since November 2023.
A failed import into PROD costs you an evening. Almost always for a reason you could have known an hour earlier. The second part covers the checks before and after the import, the things the Dataverse connector cannot do, and a green that wasn't one.
Dataverse has no feature branches. What it has is unmanaged solutions, and if you create one per work item, you have forty of them after three months. The first version of the console was a tool to merge them back together.
Four posts form a series about the Solution Administration Console and two about Schedule Board Manager, one post per build phase, each dated to the end of its phase. If you want to read them, start with part 1. The feature catalogs of the three apps: Console, Translation Studio and Schedule Board Manager. RSS feed.
Most of these tools started with a question nobody on the project could answer quickly. If you have a question like that, send me a short note.