Setting up Exchange OWA in Outlook

Having a test environment is a great thing.  Having a test environment which is an exact virtual copy of production is a wonderful thing.  However, as a developer connected to that test environment it is hard to keep up with meeting requests, emails, etc when outlook must be viewed through Exchange OWA. 

After reaching my limit of sending emails and not having them go to their intended recipients (having been caught in the test environment exchange), and consulting our resident Network guru, here is the answer:

Add a host file record for the ip of the owa url.
for: https://12.123.12.123/exchange / https://webmail.domain.com/
add 12.123.12.123     webmail.domain.com

Next flushdns
Open cmd prompt and type ipconfig -flushdns

Then we begin adding the outlook account
Open control panel
Click Mail
Show Profiles
Add
Name the profile whaterver you want.
Ok
Manually configure server settings or additional server types
Next
Microsoft Exchange or compatible service
Next
More Settings
Click the Security tab
Check Always prompt for logon credentials
Click the Connection tab
check Connect to Microsoft Exchange using HTTP
then click on the Exchange Proxy Settings
type webmail.domain.com (this is the key. The url here needs to match the url on the owa certificate) 
check the On fast networks, connect using HTTP first, then connect using TCP/IP
click ok
type the fqdn of the exchange server (i.e. server.domain.com)
type your email and check names. 

If everything went successfully you should be able to finish as you would normally.  Click next and if you want this to be the default profile be sure to set it on the mail profiles window.

Hope this helps someone else out there as I know I banged my head over this one for a while.

Take that popup!

Ever been to a website that puts an annoying popup right over the link that you want to click.  As if that isn't annoying enough some sites don't have any apparent way of closing said annoying popup.  Introducing Internet Explorer developer tools.  With a few quick steps you can blast that popup off the screen.

Basic connection for CRM2011 sdk on premise

Private Function getCRM(ByVal userauth as Boolean, Optional ByVal userid as String = nothing) As IOrganizationService
        Dim cred As New ClientCredentials()
   if userauth then
     cred.Windows.ClientCredential = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials
   else
     cred.Windows.ClientCredential = New System.Net.NetworkCredential("username", "password", "domain")
   end if
     Dim org As New Uri("http://crm/orgname/xrmservices/2011/organization.svc")
     Dim proxy As New OrganizationServiceProxy(org, Nothing, cred, Nothing)
     proxy.EnableProxyTypes()
     if not userid is nothing then proxy.callerid = new guid(userid)
     Dim orgservice As IOrganizationService = proxy
     Return orgservice
    End Function

An important note about this approach is that if userauth is false, and a userid is not supplied or the userid is not actually present in the crm system thetyped credentials will be used.  In other words even an incorrect userid will succeed.  The call will just not be made as the intended user.

Deleting all workflows and processes from CRM3

So at work we are currently doing an upgrade of Dynamics CRM3 to CRM 2011 on premise.  Upon attempting the upgrade from 3 to 4 the workflows were taking a long time to convert...like 20+ hours.  Going to Microsoft we were able to gain a script to remove all closed workflow log data.  Unfortunately due to years of bad workflows in the system the majority of the workflows were not closed.  Knowing that all of the workflows would be better handled with the addition of plugins in our new environment we just wanted to delete all the workflows, logs, rules, processes...the whole lot.  Well after playing some with working out the correct process here we go.

delete WFParameter

delete WFActionLog

delete WFAction

delete WFCondition

delete WFRuleLog

delete WFProcessInstance

delete WFRule

these ran fine however we encountered a constraint when deleting WFProcess and WFStep. The fix was as easy as modifying one of the tables relationships (process_steps) and setting the enforce foreign key constraint to no. Running the deletes after that were easy.

delete WFProcess

delete WFstep

after deleting all of this workflow data we were able to convert a 23 hour upgrade to about 3:50 hours.