The revamped Plugin Registration Tool

One of the suggestions I always give when a user has issues with the Plugin Registration Tool is to download first the latest CRM SDK.
The reason is simple: a new rollup installed or a CRM Online update can easily bring some changes with the previous versions of the tool, but if we use the latest version we can hope that the Plugin Registration Tool will work as expected.

Of course I never follow my suggestions, so it took me 2 weeks from the release of the latest CRM SDK (6.1) to discover the new Plugin Registration Tool!


It's easy to spot the switch from the ugly Windows Forms to WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

More important is the new position inside the SDK. Now the Plugin Registration Tool is located inside the folder SDK\Tools\PluginRegistration and not anymore inside the folder SDK\Bin.

Another change is the .NET framework required to run the tool, now you must have 4.5 installed:


But the main change is how the connection is handled, in the previous versions was necessary to insert the mysterious discovery url:


The new version is more user-friendly:


First it is necessary to specify the Deployment Type, between On-Premises, Online and Office 365.
For On-Premises is possible to specify the Authentication Source between Active Directory and Internet-facing deployment(IFD) and to use or not the default credentials.
For Online and Office 365, the user can select the Online Region (there is also the option Don't Know)


The functionality of the Plugin Registration Tool is still the same (register and update the plugins, install the profiler, ...) only the Properties box is positioned at the bottom (it is useful to check the assembly version)


A big welcome to the new Plugin Registration Tool!

Get the current user inside a Workflow

Inside CRM 2011 Process editor it's not possible to get the current user, in some cases a reference can be necessary (specially for automated workflows) in order to set the right user when the workflow is used to create or assign records.
A Custom Workflow Activity can be created for this purpose, taking advantage of the InitiatingUserId property.

using System;
using System.Activities;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk;
using Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.Workflow;

namespace WFUtils
{
    public class GetCurrentUser : CodeActivity
    {
        [Output("Current User")]
        [ReferenceTarget("systemuser")]
        public OutArgument<EntityReference> CurrentUser { get; set; }
        protected override void Execute(CodeActivityContext context)
        {
            IWorkflowContext workflowContext = context.GetExtension<IWorkflowContext>();
            CurrentUser.Set(context, new EntityReference("systemuser", workflowContext.InitiatingUserId));

        }
    }
}

After the Custom Activity is deployed using the Plugin Registration Tool, a new step is available

and the output parameter (Current User) can be used inside other steps