Can't publish entities in CRM 4.0?

I have been frustrated that from time to time the form, view and entity xml har caused some sort of inconsistency in an instance of an organization nin CRM 4.0.

A colleegue of mine followed this blog post and solved the issue. This will save us a lot of time in future trouble shootings. Post is found at http://blogs.salentica.com/direland/2009/04/16/a-hitchhikers-guide-to-transporting-schemas/

In our case the reasons to this issue were too many cook's. So at some point somebody changed the schema and somebody else (or the same person) imported a partial set of customizations. And schema did not match the form xml. A field on form had an emty string reffering to a non existing attribute on a related attribute.
The blog post was followed step by step and solved the issue.

As a result of this knowledge the future procedures in our company is to have a full backup of databases restored into a new database at the sql server hosting crm databases. Then creating a new organization by importing an organization instead of first creating and then make a full import of cust's will prevent this issue if we keep the newly created organization as the master organization and only deploy from master to live.....

Hope this post  will make the issue and the resolution more visible to other fellow customizers in the future.

Microsoft Windows 7 - Awesome!

XP works ok regarding performance. Vista is sensitive to resources.
But Windows 7 is working great. I use an "old" laptop - IBM ThinkPad Z60m.
Vista gave the laptop a hard time due to the missing dualcore processor and lack of graphic and memory RAM.
Windows 7 is working even better than XP.
So now my configuration with Office2007, BPOS Microsoft Online Sign in application, Visual Studio 2008, SQL express edition works like a charm.
No breakdown, restarts, idle processes that takes up cpu or memory......


It is allmost as solid as SnowLeppard.
So maybe Microsoft is really becomming a large world wide enterprice software company with the intention and capability to provide a solid framework for applications, servers and operating systems.


I have been very sceptic about Windows 7. But:
They really made it this time.
At last!