The community has the possibility to create new Q&A sites, based on the StackExchange ‘application’ through proposals on Area 51

What makes these Q&A sites way better than normal discussion boards is the ability to use them like a big wiki.
Useful content is pushed by votes of the community and is bubbling up, crap gets filtered out. Already posted information is editable for improving the overall quality.

The SharePoint community already got it’s site. sharepoint.stackexchange.com is in public beta since a few months and at the moment it looks like it could become a regular site.

You may think: why do we need yet another site, there are the MSDN forums, or x, y and z.
I could not answer this question better than this question explains it already meta.sharepoint.stackexchange.com/q/199.

At least in my opinion, the MSDN forums evolved to an award hunting area. Many ‘experts’ throw masses of answers on questions, without adding value to it (or even know the answer). Don’t get me wrong: this is not the majority, but it annoys me very much.  There is also no real way to promote valuable contributions, while devaluating the crap.

In addition the Creative Commons license guarantees that questions and answers are free to access, free to use and re-use (with attribution), and free to share… forever. So you will automatically create a knowledge base out of your contributions.

The more I use these sites, the more I miss a site which topic is the Microsoft Dynamics product range.

If you are a Microsoft Dynamics professional, I would kindly ask you to support the current proposal for a Microsoft Dynamics Q&A site

In order to support this proposal, the first step we have to achieve is to get it into the commitment stage. Therefore we need 60 followers and votes for sample questions (you can follow the proposal via the link above). If we reach this milestone, the proposal will proceed to the commitment step.

If you are interested please help to create a new opportunity for your community. You know a colleague, who’s interested? Great, tell him about the proposal. Spread the word!

Dynamics CRM Blog List
Dynamics CRM Blog List (129)

Update
The list was updated with some more blogs. If your blog is missing, please leave a comment and I will update the list.

The language code 1033 is not a valid language for this organization

I searched the net, but the only things I found was that this error is listed as an error code of Dynamics CRM (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb930493(loband).aspx) and a thread in the Dynamics Forums (http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/crm/thread/70bbbf36-1ecb-443e-852a-bebaa70c7206), but sadly without a solution.

After contacting the Dynamics CRM support team, the cause of this error was found in a matter of minutes. The system was redeployed from an installation with German base language to a system with English base language. This is an unsupported scenario.

Neither there was a warning at the redeployment wizard, nor is this mentioned in the Implementation Guide (at least, I haven’t found it there). The support engineer provided me following excerpt there this scenario is described as unsupported

The original deployment and the new deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM must be the same base language.

NOTE: Redeployment between different base languages, for example from English to French, is not supported.

To bad that this snippet is only included in the course material for the Installation and Deployment exam and not in the Implementation Guide. The only solution was to do a full reinstall of Dynamics CRM with the same base language as the originating system and to do the reployment again.

Update
In the meantime I got new feedback from the support engineer (thank you José) who is responsible for my case. Microsoft will document this scenario either with a knowledgebase article or by adding the quoted note to the Implementation Guide.

This post shows where you can find these log and trace files. For enabling the generation of trace files see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907490. Please keep in mind that although the article says that you can configure the folder in which the trace files are generated via TraceDirectory, the location is hard coded in the applications. You can set a value, but it will be ignored.

Outlook Client

• Standard log files %APPDATA%\Microsoft\MSCRM\Logs
• Autoupdate log files %APPDATA%\Microsoft\MSCRM\AutoUpdate
• Trace files %APPDATA%\Microsoft\MSCRM\Traces

Note: Since Update Rollup 7, these paths are switched to the %LOCALAPPDATA% folder in order to have a smaller roaming profile.

E-Mail Router

• You can configure the log file path. See http://blogs.msdn.com/benlec/archive/2008/03/25/how-to-implement-logging-for-the-microsoft-crm-4-0-e-mail-connector.aspx for reference

Data Migration Manager

• Trace files %APPDATA%\Microsoft\MSCRM\Traces

CRM Server

• Trace files {Install dir of application}\Trace
• Setup log files, Deployment Manager, … %APPDATA%\Microsoft\MSCRM\Logs

Event log
In addition to the log files, there is also useful information in the application event log. With the installation of CRM you get following new event sources

• MSCRMCallout
• MSCRMDeletionService
• MSCRMDeployment
• MSCRMEmail
• MSCRMKeyArchiveManager
• MSCRMKeyGenerator
• MSCRMKeyService
• MSCRMLocatorService
• MSCRMPerfCounters
• MSCRMPlatform
• MSCRMReporting
• MSCRMTracing
• MSCRMWebService

Update
Added note for Outlook Client log paths for version Rollup 7 or higher

A quick search in the internet revealed that this error message is not an unknown one (at least for Dynamics CRM 3)

• http://ronaldlemmen.blogspot.com/2007/05/error-when-creating-new-appointment.html
• http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/917010/en-us

Because the description of the articles were not suitable for the customers environment and the CRM system is a newer one ( Dynamics CRM 4), we had to dig further.

We enabled the tracing on the crm application server and set the TraceCategories to *:Error which writes only the message with TraceLevel Error to the trace file.

The generated trace file contained following error
...
Crm Exception: Message: SecLib::CrmCheckPrivilege failed. Returned hr = -2147220960 on UserId: bcf9bb2e-6070-de11-a4a6-000c29abeb6c and PrivilegeId: b5f2ee06-d359-4495-bbda-312aae1c6b1e, ErrorCode: -2147220960
...
MessageProcessor fail to process message 'Book' for 'appointment'.
...


A quick search for the name of the denied privilege showed that the security role of the user doesn’t give him the right to share appointments. Apparently, this right is needed for creating an appointment. After adjusting the security role the error was gone and the customer was happy.

The crm webservice provides multiple ways for querying data. One of them uses the QueryExpression for selecting the data.

A QueryExpression can be used for retrieving data of any crm entity. However, if you use it to query the entities activitypointer or queueitem your crm webservice proxy will throw an InvalidOperationException with the message There is an error in XML document

So what are you doing wrong? Nothing.

This problem is (poorly) described in the sdkreadme.htm in the crm sdk.

Possible failure using the CrmService.RetrieveMultiple method found in SdkTypeProxy.dll (32227)

Calling this method may result in an InvalidOperationException.

Workaround: Use the CrmService.Execute method with the RetrieveMultiple message instead.

The described workaround leads to the same error. The only way to request data from these entities is to use DynamicEntities.
This requires a small change at your existing query: you only have to tell the CRM to return the results as DynamicEntities

RetrieveMultipleRequest request = new RetrieveMultipleRequest 
{ 
  Query = query, 
  ReturnDynamicEntities = true 
};

If you have used this class, you may have come into situations in which the constructor has thrown an InvalidOperationException with the message OpenThreadToken failed with hr = 1008. A little research shows, that the most common reason of this exception is that the CrmImpersonator only works if your website is executed in the context of the crm.

But even if the application runs in the context of crm there is a gotcha which leads to this exception. If you use a generic handler in your application and you are creating a new instance of the CrmImpersonator in the constructor of this handler, it will throw the same exception. See this example for reference

[WebService(Namespace = "http://tempuri.org/")]
[WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)]
public class Handler1 : IHttpHandler, IDisposable
{
  private CrmImpersonator _impersonator;
 
  public Handler1()
  {
    _impersonator = new CrmImpersonator();
  }
 
  public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
  {
    context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain";
    context.Response.Write("Hello World");
  }
 
  public bool IsReusable
  {
    get{ return false; }
  }
 
  public void Dispose()
  {
    if (_impersonator != null)
    {
       _impersonator.Dispose();
       _impersonator = null;
    }
  }
}

It seems that the thread which processes the request is not properly initialized at this point. The solution of this problem is simple. You have to create the CrmImpersonator in the ProcessRequest method of your handler.

quoteclose qc = new quoteclose();
qc.quoteid = new Lookup( EntityName.quote.ToString(), q.quoteid  );
 
CloseQuoteRequest cqr = new CloseQuoteRequest();
cqr.QuoteClose = qc;
cqr.Status = 7;
 
service.Execute(cqr);

Danach kann eine neue Revision erzeugt werden

ReviseQuoteRequest rqr = new ReviseQuoteRequest();
 
rqr.QuoteId = quoteid;
rqr.ColumnSet = new AllColumns();
 
ReviseQuoteResponse rqresp = (ReviseQuoteResponse)service.Execute(rqr);
 
quote  quoteDraft = (quote)rqresp.BusinessEntity;

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd442453.aspx
• http://www.codeplex.com/crmperftoolkit
• Stunnware Tools for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Bitte beachten: der Rollup wurde am 8.2 ein zweites Mal veröffentlicht, da die erste Version diverse Fehler enthielt (siehe http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2009/02/11/update-rollup-2-for-microsoft-dynamics-crm-4-0-more-info.aspx )