History of FetchXML Builder

Stunnware Tools

In the good old CRM 4.0 days, no customizer or developer on the platform could survive without Stunnware Tools. Much like the situation with XrmToolBox today.

I’m guessing a company called Donaubauer AG acquired Stunnware GmbH, since you can still find traces of Stunnware Tools on their website.

One of the tools in their toolbox was the FetchXml Wizard. It would help you compose queries visually, you could execute them, and it could give you the raw FetchXML, QueryExpression code, and some other goodies.

When Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 was released and the SDK was updated, Stunnware Tools was not… And you could not connect anymore 😢

So there was an obvious void for a while, although I would still use Stunnware Tools to connect to my older environments, getting most of the query and code from whatever old organization I could find, and then tweaked the last bits manually.

The XrmToolBox was there to be filled

XrmToolBox was released by Tanguy Touzard in 2012, as a consolidation of all his various tools for the platform. Read about “The Early Years” of XrmToolBox.

The beauty of XrmToolBox was that it was built with the idea to be extensible. And the beauty for me as a new born tool developer was that by creating a tool based on this extensibility (or “plugin” as they used to be called) I could focus on creating the functionality of my tool, and letting the toolbox handle connecting to Dynamics and all that comes with that.

FetchXML Builder was born

In 2014 I had enough of that void after Stunnware Tools, and started building the FetchXML Builder for XrmToolBox, with the old FetchXml Wizard as inspiration.

On the 21 November 2014 the first release was out. Tanguy announce it too.

Find the history

NuGet

So I check the NuGet for FetchXML Builder, as this is where all XrmToolBox tools are published. Hm, first release was from 2016-04-28. What happened before that??

Pre-NuGet

Before the NuGet release was introduce by Tanguy Touzard (and me 😏 (well I only chat a bit with Mr. T)) – the tools we only ask people to “install” by just download the dll and put it in the XrmToolBox folder. So I was using GitHub for my tools.

GitHub

Checking my first release from GitHub, but it only goes back to 2015-01-28. Hm, did I you other sites before? What happened before that?

CodePlex

It started to be release on CodePlex, but it has died so I can’t look for it now. Try to open the site codeplex.com just moves you to microsoft.com. So it died hard on 2021-07-01, retired 2017, and birth 2006. Bye bye.

But I know I had some website for early FetchXML Builder, using fxb.xrmtoolbox.com. Will that only move on to fetchxmlbuilder.com. Hm.

Into the lost history

So I try in the old branch on GitHub. There were some files for the early website?

Ah, there is the index.html! And sure, it start with:

  window.location.replace("https://fetchxmlbuilder.com");

Ok, we’re on to something!

Start getting down the trenches, and way down and other file – This Is It! Look at this: https://github.com/rappen/FetchXMLBuilder/blob/old-docs/docs/javascripts/rappen-gh-api.js#L203-L219

One red thing says the downloads, and the one right is the dates!

We see that it is comment, but it is right! So this is the only history of my child…