Sandbox Vs Production Instance in D365

While working with D365 we have to deal with different instances of the organizations or we can say we have different environments while development and testing and there is different type of instance when we put it on production-

Basically there are two type of instance available in D365-

1. Production Instance 

2. Sandbox Instance

Lets discuss about both the instances in brief here-

Production Instance :

An Instance of type ‘Production’ is considered as your LIVE environment which was made available to your end users.

You cannot perform some admin actions on your Production instances.

For example, you cannot reset the instance and you cannot copy an instance to another Production instance.

You cannot set ‘Admin Mode’ on your production instances.

If you subscribe CRM 30 days trail, you will get ‘Production’ instance by default. You can change the ‘Instance Type’ to ‘Sandbox’ by using ‘Edit’ option.

Sandbox Instance:

A Sandbox instance is the place to safely develop and test your application changes with low risk.

A Sandbox instance type can be your test instance or UAT.

As an example, you can Reset (i.e., Becomes Vanilla)/Copy/Delete your sandbox instance.

In ‘Sandbox’, its easy to replicate your Production instance by using ‘Copy’ feature.

You can set ‘Admin Mode’.

Managed Vs Unmanaged solutions Dynamics 365

First of all lets understand what is the Solution

In Dynamics 365 solutions are leveraged to transport apps and components from one organization to another or to apply a set of customizations to existing apps. 

A solution can contain one or more apps as well as other components such as site maps, entities, processes, web resources, option sets, and more. 

So basically a solution is a file that you can import in to an environment as an app or to apply a set of customizations to an existing app.

Now lets understand what is Managed and Unmanaged Solution-

Managed Solutions
Managed solutions can modify the system solution components and add new components. If multiple managed solutions are installed, the first one installed is below the managed solution installed later. This means that the second solution installed can customize the one installed before it. When two managed solutions have conflicting definitions, the general rule is “Last one wins." If you uninstall a managed solution, the managed solution below it takes effect. If you uninstall all managed solution, the default behavior defined within the system solution is applied.

Unmanaged Solutions

When you import an unmanaged solution, you add all the components of that solution into your default solution. You can’t delete the components by uninstalling the solution.

When you import an unmanaged solution that contains solution components that you have already customized, your customizations will be overwritten by the customizations in the unmanaged solution. You can’t undo this

Even if you don’t plan on distributing your solution, you might want to create and use an unmanaged solution to have a separate view that only includes those parts of the application that you have customized. Whenever you customize something, just add it to the unmanaged solution that you created.

Workflow not appearing in Workflow Profiler in Plugin Registration Tool

Recently I was trying to debug the Custom Workflow Activity to rectify the logical errors, but when I was trying to select my workflow in drop down list of profiler in which I have use my custom Activity, and is was not listed there. I thought may be my workflow is not active in this case but I found that activated when I checked it.

When I tried to search the cause for why the workflow is not appearing in profile of plugin registration tool and found that - 

Make sure the user with whom you have logged in to Plugin Registration Tool and the the owner of the workflow, should be the same person. Otherwise the workflow won’t simply appear in the ‘Profile Workflow’ list.