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By Christian Waters, Director, Delivery at TrueNorth The legacy web client for Dynamics 365 was deprecated in September 2019, and was replaced by the Dynamics 365 Unified Interface. This brings a consistent design across all devices and all platforms accessing the Dataverse that underpins both Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Here I’d like to share with you a few of the new features that may not be immediately obvious, but which make a real difference to ease of navigation and […]

By Steve Drake, Director, Technology at TrueNorth IT. With the C-thing, more of us are working from home. And, as we get closer to Christmas, the cheer that Christmas tends to fill our office with – Secret Santa, Xmas jumpers, decorations, mince pies – is often absent this year. Well, you can bring some Christmas cheer to your team’s meetings with some technical know-how.   Firstly, Why Not Change your Profile Picture? You can change your profile picture within Teams. […]

By Christian Waters, Director, Delivery at TrueNorth The TrueNorth office is open again after being closed since March. After firing up the computer and dealing with five months’ worth of Windows updates, I was greeted with these poignant messages from the 16th March! The other offices at Tower Works remain mostly empty, but the incredible amount of building work continues at pace in the Leeds South Bank regeneration area. Are these apartments and offices going to be white elephants as […]

By Christian Waters, Director, Delivery at TrueNorth Password management, and the communication of new passwords, is something we consistently see people struggling with. Here we discuss some common pitfalls and give some tips on how to do this securely and with a minimum of fuss.   “One Password to Rule Them All” Password managers are essential tools for modern working. We have all heard of (and seen) the Post-It note on the monitor, but with the rapid growth of online […]

As employees start returning to offices around the country, we’ve had a request from one of our clients to create Power BI reports to help keep their staff safe during this period.   Harnessing Power BI to Track-And-Trace Power BI is Microsoft’s offering for visualizing the data that is at the core of many successful businesses. It allows interactive reports and dashboards to be rapidly produced that draw on data from many different sources. For this particular assignment, our client […]

At TrueNorth we are well versed in working remotely, and indeed we are ‘digital by default’. With more and more of us using online video and screen sharing, we thought we’d share a few of the key tips we’ve learnt over the years.   Visuals Lighting is by far the most important factor is getting a decent webcam image. Even a standard laptop webcam can produce a decent image with good lighting. Set up your workspace so that the available […]

We recently had a requirement to add a custom http header to messages being sent on a BizTalk basicHttpBinding send port. If you want to add SOAP headers, this is supported by the biztalk adapters. You just simply set the WCF.OutboundCustomHeaders context property on your outgoing message and they get added in. I was expecting a similar context property to be available for the Http headers, WCF.HttpHeaders being a good candidate, or maybe Http.UserHttpHeaders. After much testing and frustration, neither […]

Here at TrueNorth like most developers we make use of FREE open source components. Even if when you start creating something you intend to make it reusable, you cannot just make it open source and useful to someone. Just being on GIT or CodePlex does not necessarily mean people can reuse it without much help.   Open sourcing modules and components does take time. We have written a Authentication module for MVC sites that allows you to store user credentials […]

A couple of times recently we have had a requirement to lock on a named item. We have not required a distributed lock (either between app domains or between servers), simply an in memory lock on a specific item. There is no standard way to achieve this in .Net and getting the details correct is surprisingly difficult (as with all multi-threaded code) so I will share the two versions we came up with. Version 1 uses a standard Dictionary of […]