Apologize for the unfinished blog post

I accidentally published an unfinished draft blog post today, it was something in my queue that I have been trying to finish, but was not able to dedicate time to it. I published it by mistake after I clicked a wrong button.

I sincerely apologize for the confusions that it may have caused. I will try to make the post(s) available as soon as I can.

[UPDATE - May 10, 2012] The series of blog posts is available now, it is still currently working-in-progress.

Pass the Captcha Challenge of CRM Online Trial Request

This is a post that may not be technically interesting, but I thought I should share it in case you run into the same problem.

Yesterday, I was trying to sign up for a CRM online trial account, I was stunned to realize that I couldn't pass the eye test in the second step of the trial request.

I failed the eye exam miserably after many attempts including using the audio option.

The system I was using has an IE9 installed. 

I realized today this could possibly be a problem that happens to unique system environment, since it doesn't seem to be an often reported issue. The only report of this problem is a post on CRM forum, but nobody has ever responded since Nov 20, 2010. Based on the above speculation, I tried the same process on a computer with IE8 installed, and I was able to pass the eye test with my first try. 

I was relieved to realize that I was not visually blind or disabled, which I have been questioning myself ever since. PHEW!

I cannot explain the reason behind the problem, I have logged this as an issue on Microsoft connection site. If you get stuck with this issue, you may want to try a different system with an older version of IE installed. 

Hope this helps. 

Happy New Year, everyone! 

Non-sense CRM4 Customization Import Error

Here is another CRM4 customization import error that I recently ran into, but it's a non-sense and probably a nasty one.

What the problem is, I have been trying to update my development VPC image from rollup 9 to a more recent one. As soon as my VPC image is updated to any rollup after 10, I start to receive an error message when I try to import CRM customizations. The weird thing is, this error even happens in the same environment. By the same environment, I mean that it happens even I was exporting the CRM customizations and then re-importing the same customization file on the same server box.

Here is what the error message looks like:
Failure: incident_activity_parties: Cascade link type 'NoCascade' is invalid for Delete.

Since I had a little bit cycle today and I was aware that Microsoft has just released Rollup 14 last week, I thought it would be a good chance to give it another try. I usually had pretty good confidence at Microsoft team's fast turnaround in terms of bug fixing. Unfortunately it's not the case this time, the same error persisted after I updated to Rollup 14.

I was naive enough, I thought that I could become a hero if I could find a solution for this issue. So I turned on CRM server trace log, and re-ran the import process. After about two tries (first try failed for a different reason), I got 115 log files in my CRM trace folder (they consumed 1.1GB hard drive space on my poor VPC image). However those log files didn't give me much helpful information, except another error message that was thrown before the previously mentioned message, which stated that "Failed to import entity relationship incident_activity_parties", which I don't have any clue why it has happened either.

After about 30 minutes of experimenting and Google search, I gave up on this. A few folks in the community have been suggesting to muck around the customization xml file, which I am not so encouraged to go this path, as I believe that could possibly cause more problems in the long run that it actually solves.

[Update - Feb 28, 2011] I finally figured out what the problem is, I had Data Migration Manager installed on my server. As soon as I uninstalled DMM and the problem went away. Still a mystery for me, but I can now finally go with more recent rollups.