Can you build an XrmToolBox tool with Zero experience -Vibe coding with GitHub Copilot

I am not a developer. I don't claim to be a developer. I have built things, I have designed things, I have learnt how to code certain things and got better over the years, but I am not someone who lives in an IDE day in and day out. With the rise of Vibe Coding, I wanted to see if I could build something I would have been, otherwise, unable to build. To make matters worse, I wanted to build something extremely complex, with me not even understanding the foundations of what is even required (something we will come to later) to see if it was even possible through prompting alone...these are my thoughts.

I wanted to build an XrmToolBox tool! The XrmToolBox is one of my favourite pieces of software and I admire a lot of the makers who have put days, weeks, months and years into their tools, all for free, so that the community can all gain from the work they have done. I had a think and decided on, what I hoped, would be a simplistic use case (even if the build would be complex) and something I actually have need of, so I got to work. I opened VS Code, launched my Copilot and started asking it to build things for me in Agent mode.

This worked surprisingly well, from asking me questions back and forth, to creating folders and structures and eventually creating me a plugin 🥳 Wow, that was easy. I guess I can finish this blog post right here....except it didn't work. When I tried to load it I got error after error and after playing around for a while, realised that Copilot had maybe not detected all the build errors I saw in the terminal, because it told me it was complete.

I left this project for a couple of days and eventually came back to it. I thought maybe it was some bad prompting so I decided to ask it a different question, as the issue seemed to be related to libraries and other things my tool was dependant on, so I started asking it for what pre-requisites I need to be able to create a plugin. It started giving me things to install, .net frameworks, NuGet packages. Some of these things I knew but some were things I knew of. I tried to install some but again, grew tired of things not working. I parked it and came back to it a few days later.

Coming back to this again, I started with similar directions as the first time, help me build an XrmToolBox tool but this time, something was different. This time, it didn't want to help me build, this time, it told me that for an XrmToolBox tool you need a WinForms designer and that I needed Visual Studio and not Visual Studio Code 😑

Now, after several days and several attempts, I'm now being told I need to download a different tool to do this. This AI generation is fantastic! 🙃I should state, that I did not change models, this was all the same model giving me different directions and instructions.

I download Visual Studio 2026 because it's the latest version, sign into GitHub Copilot and begin the prompting again, but again starting at the pre-requisites. Enter a lot of trial and error of installing various tools for Visual Studio to get me setup but eventually, we get there.

By this point, my prompts for asking it to just build a XrmToolBox tool were getting me frustrated so I decided I would look to see if there were any tips online for getting started. This was outside of what I was trying to achieve by completely vibe coding it, but I wanted to give this experiment the fairest shot.

Predictably, Tanguy (the Legend behind the XrmToolBox) did provide some useful guidance including a template for Visual Studio to get started. It stated that is supported different version of Visual Studio but not 2026 🙃 so I downloaded it anyway and continued on trying to use it from the template gallery, other means and it was still erroring.

This was really starting to get to me. I appreciate I am not a developer, but I feel like I can learn quite well and sure I could figure this out. I kept prompting to get more information about how to fix some of the errors or dependencies I was missing and after a lot of back and forth, I finally managed to get everything installed. I opened the template provided in Visual Studio 2026 and it worked! 🥳 Yay, my first real bit of progress and I think we can also get that documentation updated 😂

So now we have the basics sorted out (after only like 3 nights of trying to get this sorted), let's ask it to build a simple tool.

Build me an XrmToolBox tool that allows me to see a list of all the cloud flows in my environment. Add a column to show me all the solutions that the flow is included in

It went off and it built a bunch of code. It told me what it did. I asked it how to get the code into a plugin and it automatically built it for me. It told me the location. I asked it how I could get it installed in the XrmToolBox and it gave me a bunch of advice about moving the .dll file and any plugins or required assemblies.

Great! Fantastic! Amazing!

We were finally getting somewhere. I found the files, I moved them to the folders as suggested. I loaded the XrmToolBox and nothing 🤷 No new tool. I searched through the installed tools, I even searched through the ones I could install. I couldn't find the name of my tool. I couldn't even find anything that looked like a new tool anywhere.

I went back to GitHub Copilot and asked what I was doing wrong. It gave me suggestions, I tried, they didn't work. I kept trying and trying and nothing was working.

I did what any good developer would do at this point, I asked a proper developer! And the proper developer gave me a proper answer which was....ask a different developer 🤣

I decided at this point, and with the help of some of the prompts, that maybe the XrmToolBox was caching my list of tools, so I decided to install a new tool from the list and then voila! My tool popped up....Not sure what happened but that didn't matter anymore.

Wow, I finally had a tool in the XrmToolBox and it was there...I mean, it was called My First Plugin and that wasn't the name of my tool but still.

And it opened! And it worked! It loaded a list of flows and showed me the solutions in them. It's at this point of me writing this that I really wished I was taking pictures of my progress, but it was somewhere around here that I actually had the idea to write this whole thing out. Sorry, just a lot of text right now.

Here's a shot of Visual Studio as I'm continuing to build just so you have something other than text to look at.

Anyway, before I continued I wanted to figure out why the name of my plugin was not working, I prompted a bunch, got new files, it kept not updating and it kept giving me ideas for trouble shooting. At this point, it pointed me towards some sort of cache or registry. I then managed to find the manifest.json file, that contains a list of the installed tools. So I deleted the entries for my tool, re-loaded and that made it worse!! My tool had now disappeared! You can tell I don't know what I'm doing. Back when my tool first appeared, it was when I installed a new tool

...let's do that again! Voila again, we have my tool back, complete with name, logo and my name.

Amongst some very good company here, from actual developers, not fake developers like me. But what does my tool look like?

I think I'm going to make this into a multi part series at I think my journey through adding features and updating this, might be really useful for myself and others to see. But my initial experiment is a success, at least by my standards. Within a few evenings, I was able to produce a working XrmToolBox tool with minimal C# knowledge, minimal knowledge about plugins or assemblies and zero previous experience building anything full code and not low code.

Ciao for now

MCJ