Removing Cloud Storage Icons from Windows 10 Navigation Pane

One thing that I tried to adjust to as I made the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10 was some of the UI differences. One of the relatively small in impact, but large in annoyance, changes for me was the change to the Navigation Pane in Explorer. Favorites had been replaced with Quick Access. That was fine, they function mostly the same, and I can pin items to Quick Access.

I did notice that after installing my various cloud storage applications (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox) that they were being placed on the same level of the navigation pane as This PC and Quick Access itself. I didn't want them there, I wanted them in Quick Access so they could be out of sight if I wanted to collapse it.

My initial thought was to just drag the different icons to Quick Access, which did give me the option to pin them there (half of what I wanted), but didn't get rid of them from their original location (the other half of what I wanted). If you're trying to achieve the same result as I was, then this should help.

Windows 10 Navigation Pane as I wanted (for the most part)

Let me preface this with the same thing everything will tell you before suggesting making changes to the registry of your machine: Only do this if you're know what you're doing, and have made a full backup of your entire registry, and know that changing your registry can mess things up pretty bad.

That being said, you can remove those pesky items from the Navigation Pane by modifying the registry. Open Registry Editor (regedit.exe) in whatever manner you normally do (Win+R, Start>Run, they are all equally great) and head to the following registry keys for the applicable application:

OneDrive

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6}

OneDrive for Business

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{423105FA-58D0-46DF-80FF-627D1DC360BC}

Dropbox

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{E31EA727-12ED-4702-820C-4B6445F28E1A}

Dropbox Business

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{E31EA727-12ED-4702-820C-4B6445F28E1B}

In each of these keys, you'll a REG_DWORD called System.IsPinnedToNamespaceTree. Double-click the item to change it's value from 1 to 0. Look at Explorer and it should be gone.

Get outta my NamepaceTree, Dropbox!

On 64-bit versions of Windows 10, you may notice that even after the above changes that the offending applications still appear in File Open/Save/Browse dialogue windows. You can remove them by making the same change to the registry key of the same name in:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Wow6432Node\CLSID

After making these changes, however, it appears that Dropbox just keeps adding itself back (by modifying the value of System.IsPinnedToNamespaceTree) when it launches.

Not a total fix, but it got most of the ones that were annoying me.

"To The Cloud!", they said.

"Go, learn Power BI", they said. So, I started.
"Go, learn SharePoint Online" they said. So, I started.
"Go, learn DAX", they said. So, I started.

Needless to say, I've not gotten far on either. I know enough to much around, and I'm on the verge of enough of being a danger to myself, and our 365 tenant.

"Go, fix Power BI", I expect them to say.
"Go, fix SharePoint Online", I expect them to say.
"Go, fix your DAX", I expect them to say.

As I reach those inevitable steps, and stumble my way to something that could be considered a solution if you squinted at it in bad light, I will of course present it here. I mean, someone might read it. Right?

Windows 10 - Disable Windows Firewall Notifications in Action Center

I recently made the move to dual boot my work laptop, so I could test out Windows 10 Enterprise (kind of being the guinea pig for my organization and seeing how our development tools worked with the new OS, as well as other server and domain management tools).

The biggest "irritation" I've come across so far is the action, or notification, center messages after turning off Windows Firewall (because we use another 3rd party tool in its place). Every few hours, and after every restart I'd be shown the message that the firewall was turned off, and I could click on the notification to turn it on (as opposed to the normal action of click on the notification to disable future messages about the firewall).

It turns out that the way to disable/suppress these messages in Windows 10 is to go to Control Panel > System and Security > Security and Maintenance (or just open the Start Menu and type Security and Maintenance), and there you will see a clickable option to hide future messages about Windows Firewall. Not as intuitive or easy to find as it was in Windows 7, but still possible.

Hope this helps ease the annoyance for some who have a legitimate reason to disable the Windows Firewall.

Its been a Do While....

So it's been close to 5 years since I actually posted anything here. I first started to use this blog as a way to document some trials and experiences I was coming across when working on an On-Premise Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 deployment for the State Agency I work for.

Since then, a few things have changed. I, uh, got a new computer, I started to work on a lot more systems, and I got promoted to Lead Programmer Analyst.

Oh yeah... and I'm about to get started with CRM again. The 4.0 system I developed and posted about has been chugging along just fine, for the most part, but the time has come for a fresh new system to take it's place. I'm now working on an IFD On-Premise Dynamics CRM 2015 deployment (although I will probably wait for the '15 Fall release, making it CRM 2016 I guess).

I attended some rather nifty training from a Microsoft Partner company called PowerObjects. A 5 day bootcamp in CRM 2015, and then 3 days of developer training. It should be enough to get me started, once I get the initial infrastructure set up that is. Due to various limitations on access to our network, I'm going to have to use an ADFS Proxy Server in the DMZ that will talk to an ADFS Server on the network which will be used to authenticate internet access attempts to the CRM application server from the web or mobile clients. And there probably needs to be a database server in there somewhere too, I hear that is kind of important for CRM.

So I'll try and post more. I'll post when I get frustrated. I'll post when I have victories, and I'll post when I think I've come across or done something that someone else could benefit from.

It's been nice to see that posts about my 4.0 issues and solutions still get active views and are hopefully helping people not pull their hair out.

Fingers crossed my posts can continue to do that.

SSRS Date Expressions

I've been doing a few CRM reports that used different date ranges as parameters. I was able to put the start and end dates of these ranges in SSRS parameters using the following expressions:

Start of Current Month:

=DateSerial(Year(Today), Month(Today), 1)

End of Current Month:

=DateAdd(DateInterval.Second, -1, DateSerial(Year(Today), Month(Today) + 1, 1))

Start Of Previous Month:

=DateSerial(Year(Today), Month(Today) - 1, 1)

End Of Previous Month:

=DateAdd(DateInterval.Second, -1, DateSerial(Year(Today), Month(Today), 1))

Start of Current Quarter:

=DateAdd(DateInterval.Quarter, DateDiff(DateInterval.Quarter, DateSerial(1900,1,1), Today), DateSerial(1900,1,1))

End of Current Quarter:

=DateAdd(DateInterval.Second, -1, DateAdd(DateInterval.Quarter, DateDiff(DateInterval.Quarter, DateSerial(1900,1,1) + 1, Today), DateSerial(1900,1,1)))

Start of Previous Quarter:

=DateAdd(DateInterval.Quarter, DateDiff(DateInterval.Quarter, DateSerial(1900,1,1), Today) - 1, DateSerial(1900,1,1))

End of Previous Quarter:

=DateAdd(DateInterval.Second, -1, DateAdd(DateInterval.Quarter, DateDiff(DateInterval.Quarter, DateSerial(1900,1,1), Today), DateSerial(1900,1,1)))

Start of Current Year:

=DateSerial(Year(Today), 1, 1)

End of Current Year:

=DateSerial(Year(Today), 12, 1)

Start of Previous Year:

=DateSerial(Year(Today) - 1, 1, 1)

End of Previous Year:

=DateSerial(Year(Today) - 1, 12, 1)

Importing Attachments to CRM

I'd been following instructions from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog about migrating notes and attachments but was running into an error during the actual import. The error I was getting was "The attachment file was not found" and it was happening for every attachment listed in my .csv file.

The problem in my case was that the files, and the .csv file, were on a network location. Even though I am running the DMM from a network drive (my environment has CRM application on one server and CRM database on another, and I just remove into them as needed, but have all files for the CRM project on a network location somewhere), it would not find files that were in the same network location.

Once I moved the .csv files and all the files it referenced (and I just used directory option A in the blog post linked above) it was able to import attachments just fine.

Removing Old Migrations from Data Migration Manager

You may get to the point where you have performed a number of migrations with the Data Migration Manager (DMM) - test and/or production.

You may have experienced that a bulk deletion or import gets longer with each migration as your total data in the MSCRM_MIGRATION database (which is either going to be in the SQL Database you specified during the install of DMM or on a local SQL Express instance) increases.

You may also have experienced a small inconvenience where all your migrations have to have a unique name.

All that is needed to get around this small problem is flushing ouu the ImportBase table in the MSCRM_MIGRATION database.

USE MSCRM_MIGRATION;

DELETE FROM ImportBase;