New PowerShell Commandlets for Dynamics CRM

I am about to make your day a bit better. Steel yourself.

Over at the TechNet Gallery, Kenichiro Nakamura posted 66 new PowerShell commands for manipulating Dynamics CRM. I have not had time yet to go through all these, and I can see that not all of them are documented acurately, but I have spent many many hours coding C# CLI applications that do similar things, and I keep redoing them. Now there is a framework available to us for doing it, and it is MIT licensed (aka go change it). This makes me very happy.

Here are the 66 functions in the .psm1 file:

• Add-CrmActivityToCrmRecord
• Add-CrmMultiRecordAssociation
• Add-CrmNoteToCrmRecord
• Add-CrmRecordAssociation
• Add-CrmSampleData
• Add-CrmSecurityRoleToTeam
• Add-CrmSecurityRoleToUser
• Connect-CrmOnlineDiscovery
• Disable-CrmLanguagePack
• Enable-CrmLanguagePack
• Export-CrmSolution
• Get-CrmAllLanguagePacks
• Get-CrmEntityAllMetadata
• Get-CrmEntityAttributeMetadata
• Get-CrmEntityAttributes
• Get-CrmEntityDisplayName
• Get-CrmEntityDisplayPluralName
• Get-CrmEntityMetadata
• Get-CrmEntityName
• Get-CrmEntityOptionSet
• Get-CrmEntityRecordCount
• Get-CrmEntityTypeCode
• Get-CrmFailedWorkflows
• Get-CrmGlobalOptionSet
• Get-CrmLicenseSummary
• Get-CrmOrgDbOrgSettings
• Get-CrmRecord
• Get-CrmRecords
• Get-CrmRecordsByFetch
• Get-CrmRecordsByViewName
• Get-CrmSiteMap
• Get-CrmSystemSettings
• Get-CrmTimeZones
• Get-CrmTraceAlerts
• Get-CrmUserMailbox
• Get-CrmUserSettings
• Get-MyCrmUserId
• Import-CrmSolution
• Invoke-CrmRecordWorkflow
• Invoke-CrmWhoAmI
• Move-CrmRecordToQueue
• New-CrmEntityReference
• New-CrmMoney
• New-CrmOptionSetValue
• New-CrmRecord
• Publish-CrmAllCustomization
• Publish-CrmEntity
• Remove-CrmEntityMetadataCache
• Remove-CrmRecord
• Remove-CrmRecordAssociation
• Remove-CrmSampleData
• Remove-CrmSecurityRoleFromTeam
• Remove-CrmSecurityRoleFromUser
• Remove-CrmUserManager
• Set-CrmActivityRecordToCloseState
• Set-CrmRecord
• Set-CrmRecordOwner
• Set-CrmRecordState
• Set-CrmSystemSettings
• Set-CrmUserBusinessUnit
• Set-CrmUserMailbox
• Set-CrmUserManager
• Set-CrmUserSettings
• Test-CrmSampleDataInstalled
• Test-XrmTimerStart
• Test-XrmTimerStop

Now breathe.

I have to highlight the couple I immediately think will change my world the most:

• By letting IT operations create new users with New-CrmRecord, setting their defaults using Set-CrmUserSettings and giving them security roles using Add-CrmSecurityRoleToUser I can impose a regime where the people who control AD and in general identity management can also reach in to CRM and enforce. This is a stepping stone to using FIM/MIM fully integrated with CRM. Cool.
• Export-CrmSolution and Import-CrmSolution are actually PowerShell commandlets I already created myself, but I would rather build on something others also use instead of rolling my own. Maintenance time saved. Connect these to a build and deploy system (TeamCity and Octopus Deploy for example), and CRM is almost a second grade ALM citizen. Now we only need proper source control, patching, no-downtime-release and differencing for solution files natively.
• DSC for CRM in general. A lot of these commands allow us to specify and test for a system end state when rolling out new environments. I see a bright future where we can install a new environment, provision language packs, import data and users and test the system - all automatically and by script. Unfortunately, DSC requires immutability, so you have to chain a couple of these together to achieve that, but it is so much closer than anything we have available elsewhere, like SSIS shapes and MSBUILD/C# frameworks. PowerShell is really the common language between dev and ops, so write new things in PS please.

Kudos to Kenichiro Nakamura and (Siri Harper for the tip); I owe you one.

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