Thursday, November 22, 2012

My experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Custom Code Validation Tool

 

Microsoft released the “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Custom Code Validation Tool”  in May 2012. The purpose of this tool is to detect the potentials issues in  HTML and JavaScript web resources when  CRM2011 starts supporting multiple browsers. 

The cross browser functionality was supposed to be released in Q2 2012 but, that did not happen. The next release of CRM2011 code name Polaris is coming out in December 2012. One of the many features included in Polaris is cross browser compatibility. This blog lists  “What’s included in Polaris?”.

After reading about Polaris, I decided to try “CRM 2011 Custom Code Validation Tool”. Here is the link to download the tool. Here are my findings. The results are mixed but you can make up your own mind.

The following screen shot displays the results from the tool. To check the results, the user has to scroll down the list of web resources one by one.

image

Issues found by the tool

I included some old and unsupported code in the libraries to test the tool. Here are some of the screen shots of potential issues found by the tool.

image

image

So far so good. Here is the screen shot of the JavaScript webresource with most issues.

image

The thing that shocked me the most is that this code is straight from the CRM SDK sample provided by Microsoft.

Issues ignored by the tool

I intentionally added some unsupported code to the JavaScript web resource. But the tool did not identify this code as potential issue.

Here is the screen shot of one such unsupported code. I am using code to attach the custom CSS on form onload.

image

Conclusion

This is very good to identify the potential issue. But I can’t say how reliable it is.

Anyway  don’t use any unsupported code intentionally.

2 comments:

  1. The SDK code sample shows feature detection, so it uses the appropriate method depending on the browser. So you will see some IE only methods paired with standards based methods. Nothing to be shocked about.
    BTW - make sure you are looking at the Script sample from the latest SDK. They were updated to be cross-browser compatible in the last release..

    ReplyDelete