Apple macOS and Console Applications with Dataverse

Third episode with the Mac Mini M4, let's try to connect to Dataverse using a console application.

I like very much Visual Studio for Windows but the Mac version has been discontinued, details here: What happened to Visual Studio for Mac?

The alternative is Visual Studio Code (we used it for PCF development on the previous post) with the extension C# Dev Kit.

When you create a new project using this extension you get two default settings:

• top level statements
• implicit using

What it means? When you open the Program.cs file you see only the line

Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");

instead of the "classical" structure with the using statements and the Main method.

The top level statements can be turned off by showing the template options and there is a setting for it.

The implicit using can be disabled by removing the line
<ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>

inside the csproj file

After these two changes we get a more "familiar" structure, something like this:

using System;

namespace Test;

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

}

}

Next step is to reference the Microsoft.PowerPlatform.Dataverse.Client NuGet package and write some code to execute the WhoAmI Message:

using System;

using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Messages;

using Microsoft.PowerPlatform.Dataverse.Client;

namespace Test;

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

Console.WriteLine("Hello Dataverse!");

string userName = "guido.preite@___.it";

string url = "https://___.crm4.dynamics.com";

string connectionString = @$"AuthType='OAuth'; Username='{userName}'; Url='{url}';

AppId='51f81489-12ee-4a9e-aaae-a2591f45987d'; RedirectUri='http://localhost';

        LoginPrompt='Auto'";

ServiceClient service = new ServiceClient(connectionString);

WhoAmIResponse whoAmIResponse = (WhoAmIResponse)service.Execute(new WhoAmIRequest());

Console.WriteLine($"Connected with UserId: {whoAmIResponse.UserId}");

}

}

A screenshot with the result:

It's useful to know I can write a console application connecting to Dataverse, I may need to test some small logic or running some updates on a set of records, it's very common scenario for me to open the editor and launch this kind of code. Plus I can do this completely inside macOS without opening the Windows virtual machine.