Check Domain User Account

 I just learned this really helpful trick.  You can check the status of a domain account using: 

net user USERNAME /domain

https://www.webservertalk.com/check-password-expires-in-active-directory/#:~:text=Check%20User%20Password%20Expiration%20Date%20with%20Net%20User,command%20in%20the%20PowerShell%3A%20net%20user%20hitesh%20%2Fdomain

Dynamics 365 Debug Custom Workflow Activity in a Real Time Workflow

 You CAN'T.

If you are having trouble following the steps to debug your custom workflow activity because the steps are not appearing, it's probably because you cannot attach to "Real Time" workflows.  If possible, make your workflow asynchronous (run in background) to debug your custom WF activity.

Email Templates for Custom Entities

I have used the trick of inserting the "magic" sequence of characters that allow you to insert custom entity fields into email templates, but there's an extra special trick if you insert a lookup field /@name.  Big thanks to Insight Dynamics blog post for the tip.  Here's an example for an entity called "Custom Entity":

{!new_customentity:ownerid/@name;}

UCI Email PartyList error - Entity type "queue" is invalid

I just ran into an error where some clever code check's the user's business unit and defaults the FROM addresss of an outgoing email to a particular Queue.  The code started throwing this error once we moved it to a Model-driven App.

It turns out the error was occurring because we had not included the Queue entity in our Model-driven App.  Once we added the Queue, the code worked just fine.

ComboBoxes in Dynamics CRM 2013

Have you tried the new ComboBox control in CRM 2013?  Wait...what did you just say?!?  Here, click on the screenshot and watch this:

Actually, I'm a little early for April Fools' Day, but I really did build a pair of ComboBoxes that are backed by two entities that have an N:N relationship.  With an added checkbox, you can override the filtering and display all the available records in the child.  The key to making it so performant was utilizing an external WebAPI caching application.  That makes it a snap to bind the jQuery Autocomplete to the JSON output.

If you need help with a ComboBox, or anything else in Dynamics CRM, don't hesitate to reach out.

Helpful links and information for CRM Developers

My collection of essential links and information for Dynamics CRM Developers

MSDN References
Linq query examples
MSDN Client-side programming reference
Developers guide to reports for CRM

Communities
MSDN CRM Forums

StackOverflow CRM Questions

Tools
PowerShell Tools
MscrmTools / XrmToolBox

CRMSvcUtil XrmServiceContext example:
CrmSvcUtil.exe /codeCustomization:"Microsoft.Xrm.Client.CodeGeneration.CodeCustomization, Microsoft.Xrm.Client.CodeGeneration" /out:Xrm\Xrm.cs /url:https://myord.api.crm.dynamics.com/XRMServices/2011/Organization.svc /username:admin@myorg.onmicrosoft.com /password:pass@word1 /namespace:Xrm /serviceContextName:XrmServiceContext

Setting up RAID 1 on M5A78L Windows 7

My current Win7 Media Center PC has been running 24x7 for 3 plus years and the cruft on the OS was starting to really slow things down.  I figured it was time to re-install, but this time I wanted redundancy, so I bought two WD 160 drives to setup a RAID 1.  Here's the trick to setting this up in the ASUS Bios:

1. On the SATA Configuration tab, select Ports 1-4 and change their mode to RAID (note this also changed 5-6 to RAID, so I needed to switch that back to IDE for my optical).
2. Save and Reboot.  Wait for the RAID Bios screen to appear and hit CTRL + F
3. In the RAID configuration, select the LD config and select LD 1 on the next screen
4. In the LD details page, use SPACE to change value of RAID to 1 and select your drives. 
5. CTRL + Y saves changes and then reboot and you're done!