Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie Blog

Join us for a "Live" Live Framework webcast..

2008-12-02T04:38:00Z

http://blog.arash.cc/post/Join-us-for-a-%22Live%22-Live-Framework-webcast.aspx

Why Mesh-Enabled Web Applications

2008-11-26T23:06:00Z

http://blog.arash.cc/post/Why-Mesh-Enabled-Web-Applications.aspx

Mesh-Enabled Applications are born.............

2008-10-14T07:15:00Z

I have been busy. Extermely busy, and you will know why very soon. I will be presenting a session on Mesh-Enabled Applications at PDC 2008 in LA. But what are Mesh-Enabled Applications? what can you do with them? how do they provide pure goodness and value to developers? and why do I care.... Mary-Jo Foley seems to have some ideas but I am making no comments. The best way to find out is to attend my session at PDC. I promise you will not be disappointed.

Here is the session description on PDC 2008 website.

Live Services: Building Mesh-Enabled Web Applications Using the Live Framework

Presenter: Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie

Come learn how to extend your existing web applications and get them to live and breathe within Live Mesh. Mesh-enabled web applications can be accessed from anywhere through a web browser as well as run locally (and offline) on a user's desktop and can take full advantage of many Mesh value-add services such as a dedicated sandbox, online and offline synchronized storage, auto deployment and update, identity, application catalogue, social computing and more. Learn about the architecture and lifecycle of applications which live in the Mesh and how to Mesh-enable your Silverlight 2 and JavaScript application.

Looking forward to seeing you there.......

Tags:

Advanced, Live Framework, Live Mesh, Live Services

Live Mesh is Live....

2008-04-24T04:26:00Z

Live Mesh was launched last night but we have only told part of the story. The platform and developer story is the most interesting part. I will be blogging more about Live Mesh Developer Platform on my blog soon......you can find a list of interesting posts about Live Mesh here.

Extending CRM forms with Managed code using Silverlight 1.1

2007-11-28T17:20:00Z

Check this out:

http://blog.arash.cc/post/Adding-client-side-business-logic-to-CRM-forms-using-Silverlight-managed-code.aspx

Make sure you use my new blog

2007-10-16T06:45:00Z

I still get messages and comments added to this blog. That is great but I don't check this blog very often so your questions stay unanswered.

If you have any questions or comments about this blog, please use my new blog where I am more responsive to messages and questions.

Merci beaucoup

Arash

Blog move....Come and visit my new blog.....

2007-08-30T12:08:00Z

I have decided to move my blog to a different server.

My new blog is located here:

http://www.arash.cc/

http://blog.arash.cc/

I will continue to blog about the same topics that you see here and more new stuff as we get green light to talk about them in public; Microsoft Live Services and developer platform, CRM, Program Management, etc, etc. I also try to answer questions about my posts, in my spare time.

Come and pay a visit......I'll be fun.....

Thanks for all the nice comments

2007-05-08T04:09:00Z

Just had a chance to go through many comments that have been posted to my blog. Thank you for all the nice comments. As for CRM questions, sorry I am not going to spend much time replying to those. There are now other folks who are more qualified to answer those kind of questions...

Using Silverlight as an excuse to get back on blogging....

2007-05-08T03:45:00Z

What a great way to get back on the blogging scene (I hope it lasts, with all the things that are going on:-)), last week Mix conference in Las Vegas had a great announcement. I personally didn't attend but a few colleagues went and did a great job of sending up to the minute update. If you are a developer looking for new toys to play with, look no further... Silverlight,which was the star of the show at Mix, is a new client side technology from Microsoft that enables development of cool browser hosted managed apps and videos. Yes, that means that you can use C# to build your apps and get them streamed into in browsers like IE and Firefox. The Silverlight is very light in size and includes some of the Windows Presentation Foundation (A.k.a Avalon) libraries which allow you can build declarative and cool graphical and animation apps that can be hosted in the browser. Check out this demo which is built with Silverlight.

What does Silverlight mean to Software+Service: It provides a nice platform to build Software+Service applications that provide rich user interaction and visuals while talking with a heavy weight service in the cloud. It is like Ajax on steroid. ..... I hope more Microsoft Services take advantage of Silverlight and provide rich browser based interactions and I am sure you will start seeing more Live services provide richer experience using this technology.

As for me, I just downloaded Orcas VS to build some managed apps for some of our Software+Service scenarios. Will try to post what my experience was.

Time to shift gears….

2007-03-13T00:55:00Z

After spending a few years working on one of the best products and business application platforms around, I have decided to shift my focus on another great-to-be product that is currently in incubation at Microsoft. Within the next few weeks, I will no longer be directly working on the Dynamics CRM product. Having said that, I will still be closly watching the Titan release as I truly believe, as our first commercial Software + Service product, it will open a new chapter in our company and the software industry history.

As for what I will be working on, unfortunately, I can’t tell much at this point, but I can tell this much that as soon as we are ready to tell the world about it, you can’t miss its noise. More on this later…..

I haven’t yet decided what I want to do with this blog, I might consider archiving it somewhere so folks can still access a few articles that have been very popular. Suggestions are welcome…..

It has been awesome to work with CRM customers and partners. Keep partying on Dynamics CRM. It is a groundbreaking product with tons of customer value to offer for years to come.

As for me, on to a new venture………

Convergence preview of Titan: Building Business Applications on CRM Platform

2007-02-15T05:38:00Z

Thanks to everyone who has responded directly to me about my previous post. I have now a list of Architects, CTOs, etc from various partners and ISVs who have lined up for the discussions around Titan programmability at Convergence. Looking forward to the discussions…..

Test drive CRM Titan Dev power at Convergence 2007

2007-02-05T12:15:00Z

It is very likely that I (or/and another collegue from CRM programmability) will be at Convergence 2007 this year. If you are a CRM customer or partner with an active NDA with Microsoft, there will be a chance to test drive the all new CRM Titan developer experience and tools. I am planning to run a number of one-on-one API, workflow and programmability usability studies, so drop me a line and book your place! Please note that the space is very limited so you need to hurry!

CRM Titan Preview is released to partner community!

2007-01-15T10:50:00Z

I have been pretty busy presenting the new extensibility points and scenarios of CRM Titan, and in particularly CRM Live, to our partner community throughout the Christmas and New year. Just before the Christmas, we released the first preview of CRM Titan which comes in different flavors including a fully Microsoft hosted CRM solution and platform and an on-premise version. We had a pretty good start with our “power of choice” message and partners are getting engaged with endless opportunities to build solutions and applications on CRM Live and/or On-premise and/or Partner hosted. In other words you will see the power of choice message getting crystal clear, especially around customization and extensibility, within the next few months and as we march towards our final release. Expect very very exciting and busy days ahead for the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM Live……. Stay tuned….

A platform for building your business application, no matter what it is

2006-12-22T07:18:00Z

If you want to build a business application, let's say a real estate application, you typically will need a number of building blocks to construct your application architecture. You need UI components, service interfaces, security support, communications, data store/services etc etc. I bet if you ask most of the developers and architects out there about how to do this, they would start from the scratch and use core technologies like .NET and SQL to build their custom business app. Look at the wealth of custom business applications that exist in today's enterprises. But, I believe, there is a valid and superior alternative to that approach that will save you huge sums of money and significant amount of time.

Microsoft CRM has already built majority of the building blocks that you need to build your business application. These blocks are built in a way that they can easily be extended with much less effort compared to building the blocks from the scratch. Your application does not need to be a CRM application in order to benefit from Microsoft CRM platform. Your business application could be of a banking, finance, HR, real estate, health club, educational, legal or etc etc type application. What I am really trying to say here is that you can use our platform as a business application platform and almost forget about the CRM part in the product name. I am increasingly seeing this trend happening where our partners use our platform to build a non-CRM application. Nothing seem to be stopping them from reaping the benefits of such approach.

To better articulate my point, I use a standard application architecture view that I borrowed from Microsoft Patterns and practices web site. This diagram simply depicts typical components that you see in a business application. I have added numbers to each major component so I can add comments about how those components are made available through CRM platform:

1)Targeted users: A business application has a variety of users ranging from business managers and CEOs to administrators who maintain and customize the application to developers who develop rich extensions. CRM platform provides an extensive range of tools, APIs and UIs to satisfy the need of different users who interact with the system. Depending on what persona uses your application most, you can invest in enhancing and customizing the experience of that persona using our tools.

2)User Interface components: You need a rich and flexible presentation layer for your app. CRM UI, including the main application and forms are customizable. You can use simple tools to customize the navigation structure and form layouts as well as the ability to include client side business logic(e.g. validation) through scripting languages and client events. Look under client side programmability and customization sections of CRM SDK docs to see the full extent to which you can save yourself a bunch of time by using what is provided by the CRM platform as part of the presentation layer of your application. BTW, I am not saying that you don't need any custom controls of you own but i am saying that our UI extensiblity take you more than half way towards your fanciest UI dream. Alternatively, if you want to create attractive smart client or composite apps, nothing will stop you from using other technologies (e.g Windows Presentation Foundation) to build those richer UIs on top of our platform.

3)Security: CRM provides a rich security model based on roles and privileges that allows you to easily customize and control the access to your data and process assets, based on your need. The security controls access to various types of the business entity data as well as instances of that data. Customization of security roles and privileges are accessible through UI tools or APIs.

4)Operation Management: administration tools and APIs allows you fully maintain and manage the lifecycle of your business application that is built on top of CRM platform

5)Communication: CRM platform is designed based on a message oriented communication architecture(see my earlier blogs). Any custom application built on top of our platform will use this approach to communicate with the platform and your custom business logic that you may have embeded in the platform. All the additional components that are added to the platform are responsible to manage their communications between themselves but can easily follow the same pattern as what is used inside of the platform.

6)Service Interfaces and business components: this is where you get the most value. CRM platform has a set of customizable and dynamic web services APIs that allows your application to easily work with the platform operations and business entity data. The services are fully plug-able and extendable through code. The Workflow engine provides the ability to easily define custom business processes and hook them into various platform events. The Business Entity model is flexible and fully customizable through web service APIs or the UI components and tools. The saving you get as a result of using our business entity and process model vs creating your own is going to be significant.

7 & 8) Data storage and access: The data access provides multiple choices to access and manage data ranging from UI based query building and execution model for non-technical users to direct read from SQL format to strongly typed query building using IntelliSense in Visual Studio. The range of data access options means that depending on what query model you are more comfortable with, you can use the appropriate query approach. All these means that you don't need to worry about managing your query access and focus on making your application smarter and richer.

CRM update rollup to address a number of minor programmability issues

2006-12-21T05:06:00Z

As part of our continued commitment to respond to customer asks and issues, we have just released an Update rollup for CRM V3.0. Among others, this rollup also includes a number of specific fixes for some minor issues related to the programmability and SDK. This includes fixes to callouts and form events. You only need to install the update if you have experienced the specific issues described in the update description. You can download the update from here.