What is the Dataverse Browser?

It's a browser which allows a Dataverse developer to:

Debug plugins in live (while navigating on a Model Driven App)
Test plugins without having to deploy them. This speed ups developments and enable coauthoring on plugin assemblies.
Analyze in real time what plugins are triggerred. This is particularly useful when you have plugins triggerring other plugins.

How does it work?

The application embeds a web browser based on Chromium (thanks to CEFSharp). It intercepts all web api requests and translates them to SDK requests. Then it analyzes if some plugin steps are registered on the message. If yes, it loads them and make them run locally. All other requests are sent to the Dataverse, so that the plugins are interacting with the real database.

For now, only create and update requests are properly translated. Other requests (retrieve, delete, custom api, batch, ...) should be implemented in not too distant future. Please note that the chosen architecture has some limits which will probably never fixed by this project:

There is no support for transactions
When plugins are triggered because of a server side operation, they will not be run locally
For many reasons, behavior will never be perfectly similar to the one when plugins are executed on server side.

How to start?

Warning

Keep in mind that it is a very first version. They are a lot of known bugs and probably more waiting to be discovered. There is little to no error management. If the application crashes, you will have to check the event viewer to know why. Moreover the UI is very minimalist and not very beautiful. That said, it still runs quite well on my laptop and it's already a real time saving application. I hope it will be the same for you.

Prerequistes

You need:

A PowerPlatform environment with dataverse
A .NET debugger (preferably Visual Studio) running on Windows 10 or Windows 11
A plugin project. It must have been deployed on Dataverse and you must have its source code.

Let's go!

The simplest way to test the Dataverse.Browser is to:

Download the latest release
Unzip the file in the folder of your choice
Run the start.cmd file. If you run directly the .exe file, it will work, but you will not be able to edit plugins without restarting the app.
Enter the settings of your environment:
- A name meaningful for you
- The host name of your instance (without the https://)
- The path to the plugins assembly file (the dll). For a better experience, it should be compiled in debug mode with the pdb file generated. Please note that there are no controls for now. If you do a mistake, the app will crash without warning.* Click on the "go" button.
A popup asking you to authenticate is displayed. You need to use a system administrator. If you have a big assembly file and/or a lot of steps, the UI may freeze at this step. Don't worry and please wait few seconds.
Then the browser is started. You need to authenticate again. This time, you can choose any user and should take the one that is relevant for your tests.
Enjoy!

At the top right of the window, you have 3 icons: