Everybody should know XrmToolBox by now. I bet the majority of professionals who have worked with Power Platform ever since the days it was called XRM are aware of it. The audience of makers, developers and admins working with products built on Dataverse (Dynamics 365 CRM, Power Apps, Power Pages, etc.) has grown massively over the past few years, though. We need to ensure the new generation learns about it. But importantly: we also need to ensure folks who know it don’t forget about what’s in the ‘Box.

Being a community project with no official funding sources, there isn’t a marketing or UX team to productize XrmToolBox and the plugins built for it. As a result, it’s an experience built by developers, for developers. Technically brilliant, but not always easy for potential end users of these tools to approach.

I’m not a developer in the classic sense because I’ve never bothered to learn programming by typing. I do my typing here on my newsletter, social media and various sites. When it comes to building business solutions, I rely on configurable and extensible pieces of software built by others. Via GUIs, copying and pasting, or just minor tweaks of JSON/XML/YAML/HTML/etc. And of course the awesome plugins in XrmToolBox.💪

Still, I would love to give back to the community in more ways than just articles and posts. Which is why I decided to try and “reimagine” how XrmToolBox and its hundreds of plugins could be discovered. But let’s start from the current state of things.

Inside the Windows Forms application itself, there is a Tool Library for searching through the catalog of plugins available. You could use the date filter to sort the most recently updated plugins to the top, but by default it’s an alphabetical sort of an ever-growing list. While options exist to use this view effectively, you pretty much have to figure out how it works — as opposed to just using it.

What about the web-based experience? On the XrmToolBox website, the Tools list page does offer a more universal UI for searching and filtering the list of plugins. If you were surfing the web in 2015, this would have been a perfectly regular user experience to expect.

But it’s 2025 now. We’ve seen XRM evolve into Power Platform, and the websites we use are also a wee bit different these days. At the same time, the demand for community tools to fill the product gaps left by Microsoft (in their pursuit to burn the ships and double-down on AI) is only expanding. Their prioritization rule obviously is “Copilot or GTFO” — meaning that the foundational platform tools aren’t an investment area unless they can be shown to serve the GenAI use cases.

How could we make the hundreds of XrmToolBox plugins more discoverable and accessible to the low-code maker audience that would benefit from these power tools? I still believe in the power of the web and graphical user interfaces. Importantly, if the experience is in line with how people as consumers interact with app stores in general, we remove a key barrier from getting them to try the many community tools out there.

Today, we have a new option to search and discover tools for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 development and administration. XrmToolBox Plugin Catalog, available at xrm.jukkan.com, shows what a tool marketplace in 2025 looks like:

We have category pages showing a visually inviting list of tools to browse, filter, and click into for details:

Each tool has a page with more details. Clicking on the “View Tool Details” will open the specific project page of the tool, either a GitHub repo or a dedicated page/site (such as this UML Diagram Generator):

You can also browse all plugins from the same author on a dedicated page, such as Mr. Rapp here:

While we don’t have too many ratings for plugins on average (another UX challenge), there is nevertheless data to create an app store style “top rated” list. As well as show a carousel of featured plugins:

For all of those who aren’t yet using XrmToolBox, there’s a short getting started page with sections on what, why, installation, plugin management, connections, and FAQ:

That’s about it. Check it out and do let me know what you think!

It’s all vibes.🙈

This all started in September when I was experimenting with Lovable and how it could build a modern UI on top of some existing data source. I had a static JSON file with all the XrmToolBox plugin details and gave that to AI. The result was shockingly good. After a one-shot prompt like this one below, I already had basically what’s now the Feed view on the xrm.jukkan.com site.

Then, after a few tweaks, I put the artifacts in a GitHub repo. This allowed me to continue working with other AI coding tools like Claude Code. While Lovable is great for the one-shot PoC creation, I haven’t fallen in love with the general approach of how this hot Swedish startup offers their tooling. But for many people, it’s probably all you’d need. Me, I like to experiment with things and have found Claude to be a pretty good AI assistant to turn my ideas into code.

The plugin data itself is retrieved using a legacy feature from the Power Apps Portals era: OData feeds. Since the XrmToolBox site is fairly old by now, it still offers the ability to read an unauthenticated feed of data from Dataverse tables that are configured to be public. So, I “hacked” the feed URL and configured a daily GitHub Action to go and retrieve the plugin data as JSON.

A few months ago, I would not have been able to do any of this. It’s not a matter of the information not being out there on the web. Yeah, templates for generic React sites like this surely exist somewhere. Generative AI is not about inventing anything brand new; rather, it’s about remixing the content that has been published before and offering it in an ultra-personalized experience via a chatbot.

I still have zero skills in setting up something like this without Claude & friends, yet it allows me to explore possibilities beyond the GUI. I would never build something on top of non-public data with just prompts and vibes. Yet putting a website out there is, to me, a safe enough approach to experiment with how LLMs can help citizens and low-coders create new tools for themselves.

This project is on GitHub, of course. You’re welcome to have a look at what my AI buddies and I have built. If you encounter problems or have ideas about how to improve it, the issues are a great place to communicate them.

If it’s been a while since you’ve looked at what’s new in XrmToolBox, start by checking out the recently updated plugins in the catalog. If you see something that seems valuable, then install it, try it, review it, and tell the tool makers you appreciate their efforts. We don’t all need to be writing code to make a difference — sometimes just telling the world about what you’ve discovered is enough.