Whether you are a functional consultant, developer, tester or have another role on a Power Platform project, having the right tools at your disposal is key to boost your productivity – or simply speaking - make your life easier.
Personally, I am using Chrome as my default internet browser, and I am a big fan of using different extensions. Recently I have discovered that there are some new ones out there beyond the classic Power Pane and Level Up.
Let's explore some of these Chrome extensions that can add some sugar and spice to your development process.
Level up for Dynamics 365/Power Apps
Level up is my personal favourite, and it was one of the first extensions to support the development of D365 and then Power Apps as well. Instead of creating bookmarks, it allows you to quickly perform advanced and hidden actions within a model-driven app. It allows you to check record properties, logical names, option set values or entity metadata and more. Apart from helping with build and testing, it also can help with support and troubleshooting thanks to the “Impersonate” option. (It might be blocked though depending on policies configured within an organization).
Level up has the most users compared to the other Power Apps - related extensions and is rated 4.9, so definitely a key recommended extension to use.
Link to Level up in Chrome Web Store:
Dynamics 365 Power Pane
My other favourite one is Dynamics 365 Power Pane. It is very similar to Level up when it comes to the features it offers, but there are some additional ones like “Form Editor” and “Entity Editor”. If you need to check something, it’s okay to use it. However, avoid creating any new components that way as they would be created in the default environment with the “new” prefix”.
(I think that’s why Microsoft removed that option from the form ribbon – if you have been working with D365 for a while, it might still remember it.)
Hopefully, in the near future, this feature will be improved to take into account the recently released feature of the “preferred environment” and it will open the forms and entities within the preferred environment instead of the default one. Fingers crossed!
Link to Dynamics 365 Power Pan:
Toolshed for Power Platform / Dynamics 365
Toolshed is my latest discovery and I love it already! It’s a “Utility Bot for Power Platform / Dynamics 365 Developers and Admins”. It does come with a menu to help with navigation as the other ones. However, its beauty sits in the ability to execute basic natural language query to quickly retrieve fields from a specific record, show hidden form fields, enable fields, or show attribute schema names. It lets you be specific with your queries and ask: "Get telephone1 from account where name is Contoso" or “create web resource in SOLUTION”, where you can actually define the target solution to use!
I highly recommend testing it for yourself - you can watch an introduction video on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2oPe090j0U&t=104s.
In the video description you will also find a list of all available commands. One of them is “tell me a joke”, so I hope you are already in the Chrome web store installing it!
Link to Toolshed for Power Platform / Dynamics 365:
D365 SidePanel Dev Tools
Still looking for something else? An alternative to the Level up, Power Pane and Toolshed can be D365 SidePanel Dev Tools. It comes with pretty much the same features as the aforementioned tools. However, there is a twist that might be worth testing and seeing if you will like. It’s called a “SidePanel” for a reason, as indeed, it’s a side panel. If you use a tool like this a lot, you can have it opened all the time, next to your Copilot – see the screen below:
Link to D365 SidePanel Dev Tools:
AutoReview for Power Automate
AutoReview for Power Automate extension allows you to upload a solution with flows and it will analyse them for you. I have only just started using it recently, but I find it quite useful for both, analysis and to use it for documenting the flows. The code review option scores the flows and checks for errors and warnings. It also allows to export csv files with variables, actions, and connections. Plus, it can create flow diagrams for you, making it a handy alternative to using XrmToolBox's "Flow to Visio" feature. A full guide to the tool can be found here: https://pa-autoreview.weebly.com/guide.html
Link to AutoReview for Power Automate:
Plugin Code Generator D365
Personally, I don’t create plugins. However, this tool sounds useful in helping you to start writing a plugin code. It allows you to generate plugin code based on entity name and action.
“The Plugin Code Generator for MS CRM Chrome extension likely provides a streamlined and automated way to generate code snippets or templates for plugins in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.” Once you name your project, and select an entity and action, you can download the code in “cs” format, so that’s definitely an extension to consider using. Currently it has over 200 users, so maybe you will be the next one?
Link to Plugin Code Generator D365:
D365-UI-Test-Designer
Next extension I discovered, it’s an extension for designing and capturing D365 UI Tests. It isn’t something I personally use as a functional consultant. However, I have played around with it for a bit, and it does help you to generate test scripts to be used in automated testing. Even if the test script will not provide you with the full required scope, it is a good starting point and it can speed your testing. “The test suite that you create can be exported (and imported again). In addition to this, the extension can create a fully functioning D365-UI-Test UI Test script, which you can use for executing directly in D365-UI-Test”. As of the time of writing, the extension has a 5.0 rating from over 140 users and is used by almost 700 users, so definitely worth a look!
Link to D365-UI-Test-Designer:
D365: Dynamics 365 & Power Platform updates
This extension is different to the ones described above as it does not help with build or test... However, it does help you to stay up to date with the latest news from the d365hub.com. D365Hub aggregates Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform's latest updates through various Blogs, YouTube channels, and Podcasts.
The extension itself allows you to set your preferences for the type of news you want to see across Azure, D365, Microsoft 365 and Power Platform. Once you do, you can use the extension to check the news feed without opening the website itself. It has almost 800 users, so again – worth a look.
Link to D365: Dynamics 365 & Power Platform updates:
The below extensions are not D365/Power Platform-specific, but they do help me with certain tasks and activities that I need to undertake when working on projects.
Fake Filler
While I do not execute e2e tests, when I build an app, I still need to unit test them. Sometimes, I require to create complex forms with multiple mandatory fields. To speed up the process of testing them, I would use a form filler that fills all inputs on a page with fake/dummy data.
Recently, I started using “Fake Filler” as it is a free tool that helps me with testing Power Apps and also forms on the portals (i.e. Power Pages). You can find some alternatives, but I find Fake Filler easy to use and has 725 ratings scored at 4.4 – not bad!
Link to Fake Filler:
Scribe: AI Documentation, SOPs & Screenshots
Every so often, I also need to produce some custom training materials or provide users with guidance steps how to perform a certain task. Most of the time, I have used the Snipping Tool to take a print screen. However, that changed for me when I discovered Scribe! It is an excellent tool that will help you to generate steps with print screens to use in your documentation. I still need to tweak it and change it, but it gives me a great start and saves me a lot of time. The free version is enough for me, and it should be for most of you. If you need more though, there is also a pro version that will give you some extra functionality that will allow you to generate a document instead of copying the content, and much more.
Link to Scribe:
(Click) Color Picker
Click Color Picker or Color Picker are extensions for web developers, designers, and anyone who needs to choose colours from a webpage or extract a website's colour palette. When I am working with Power Pages or trying to apply an environment theme, I would use them to get my customer’s colour scheme from their website to make it consistent with their branding. They work slightly differently, so test them both and decide which experience better suits your needs.
Link to Color Picker:
Link to Click Color Picker:
Conclusion
The above Chrome extensions are the key ones that I am mostly using on a daily basis (or recently discovered). Some of them are also available on other internet browsers, like Edge, so have a look for them if Chrome isn’t your default web browser.
Also, head to the Chrome web store and check if any other extensions can help you with your everyday tasks.
Or maybe you are already using something else that I didn’t cover here? If you do, please kindly leave a comment here or on LinkedIn.