Vibe coding an XrmToolBox Tool part 6 - Beta testing and feature requests

We've built a tool, but I want to make sure this tool adds value for people and building from just my own needs and perspective will only take me so far. It's time to Beta test.

This has 2 main advantages, 1, I get new ideas, 2, I understand if my tool will actually work on other peoples machines 😅

I reached out to a couple of friends and they were more than happy to test out the tool. I gave them access to the .dll file and success, the tool actually loaded and worked!

I had a quick call to explain the tool with one friend, while the other just started using it. Both explained that the tool was easy to understand and use, which is great! But I got some instant feedback, what if there are a lot of flows from 1st or 3rd party solutions, is there a way to filter them out? 🤔

Back to GitHub Copilot and asked it to add a new button to the ribbon to hide flows inside of managed solutions. This has a couple of advantages, in development environments you can exclude the flows so you know which ones you need to manage, rather than ones that exist in downstream environments. In downstream environments, it can show you flows which are not in managed solutions and therefore might need to be cleaned up.

The first makes the flow list more manageable in dev, if you have 1st or 3rd party solutions installed, the second is a good way to ensure Test/UAT/production environments are maintained properly.

The other piece of instant feedback was actually when I was demoing to software, where the tool was not working as I expected. Sometimes the flow owners were not loading, or flows were disappearing. None of this I saw in my testing of this tool 😱 This lead me to some hypothesis as to why this was happening, as they seemed to be occurring on flows where the Owner or Co-owner was a disabled user. Could this be messing with how to tool works, that seems like a big problem if I can't get this fixed.

I describe the problem to Copilot and it tells me that the problem is likely due to another reason, that there is some optimisation issue, where, when one thing changes, it causes some issue. It goes ahead and makes some changes to optimise the tool, which is great. However, it gives me another idea, due to why I thought this was a problem.

Wouldn't it be great if it highlighted if a user was disabled? That has a big advantage and something I hear all the time. Users leave organisations all the time and surely...surely that make sure that owners have valid co-owners or the primary owner is transferred all the time right 😂 Yeah, not right.

I prompted Copilot and got it to add a couple of different things, one the word disabled is added next to the users name in the tool, but secondly it adds conditional highlighting to the whole row to visibly show to users that the flow has a owner/co-owner that has left the organisation.

Beta testing has proved useful already and this is before it really began.

About a week goes by and the beta testers come back with a few more ideas that I implemented, but more than anything, this proved to me that this tool works, that this might be something I could release to other people, that people might find some value from this tool!

Now, how do you release a XrmToolBox tool???

Ciao for now!

MCJ