Ben Riga's Deep Shift

I’m back with another episode of Azure Lessons Learned.  In this one I discuss building apps that need to be able to scale very highly very quickly.  Jim Zimmerman , the CTO and Lead Developer for Thuzi , walks me through the Facebook application...

In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Stephan Friedl, Chief Architect at Quark Software .  Quark (of Quark XPress fame ) has been built a new business called Quark Promote for small and medium business to design and print high-quality...

As I mentioned, over the past few months I’ve been working on a number of activities related to the Windows Azure Platform.  In particular, I’ve been working with several partners as we prepared for the PDC’09 conference.  While we were preparing...

I had been maintaining a list of Dynamics CRM-related blogs that I tried to read on a regular basis.  I thought I’d make that list available to folks in the community as I’m sure others will find that interesting.  I haven’t been maintaining...

I’ve been busy.  For the past 5 months or so I’ve been working on something completely different.  I moved out of the Dynamics world :( and into the Azure world :) . In July I was asked to help out with the PDC planning.  David Aiken ’s...

Sitting in the audience of the keynote I never had any idea how much work and how many people were involved in pulling together that one event. This year at PDC, when Ray Ozzie's keynote kicked off, I pulled out my video camera and walked around back...

I had some fun and met some interesting folks last night at the SDForum Windows SIG meeting.  I presented a trimmed down version of the Business Action World Tour content but still had to cut myself off at 9:00pm.  Nobody seemed to mind though...

Ok; so maybe I got a little overexcited in the final installment to this 5-part series.  <Jazz Hands!> This time around we spend time talking about how to use Silverlight to build experiences that will compel users to want to come back again...

In this episode we talk about a variety of topics including using Silverlight for UI, composing using 3rd party web services and storing complex information in Dynamics CRM. We spend most of our time on the flight booking page. This page was built using...

In this episode we dive into some of the real code behind Wide World Importers Conference site.  Girish walks us through the code-behind for the contact/profile and conference registration options pages. There’s not really a lot of magic here. ...

The good folks from the SDForum Windows SIG asked me to present at their meeting next week in Mountain View.  If you’re in the area drop by: Wednesday, June 24, 2009 - 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM Microsoft Silicon Valley 1065 La Avenida Street Building 1 ...

In yesterday’s episode we very briefly touched the identity and authentication part of the demo where, on the self-service site, the attendee registers using Windows Live ID. In this episode we go a lot deeper. Identity and authentication is hard. Simple...

Girish and I dropped in to the new Channel 9 Studio (formerly Monaco) to record a few Channel 9 episodes around some demo code we’ve been working on for a few months. In this series we’ll focus on self-service and specifically on building self-service...

Jon White, a Technology Specialist over on the CRM Online team, has been playing with custom dashboards and recently posted his work to the CRM Online blog .  He walks through how he pulls the data using CRM SDK web services and uses LINQ to manipulate...

A few readers asked about getting access to the slides from the Business Action World and Virtual Tour events.  I’ve also updated the individual blog posts but thought those that have already had a look at the recordings might miss the updates. I...

Last week we presented the content developed for the Business Action World Tour virtually via Live Meeting. We had hundreds of people register and join us for these events. The number one question people had was about getting access to the recordings...

This past week we presented the content developed for the Business Action World Tour virtually via Live Meeting. We had hundreds of people register and join us for these events. The number one question people had was about getting access to the recordings...

This past week we presented the content we developed for the Business Action World Tour virtually via Live Meeting. We had hundreds of people register and join us for these events. The number one question people had was about getting access to the recordings...

This past week we presented the content we developed for the Business Action World Tour virtually via Live Meeting. We had hundreds of people register and join us for these events. The number one question people had was about getting access to the recordings...

We've had some great success with the Business Action World Tour events worldwide.  We're now reprising that content virtually for those ISVs and developers who could not attend a physical event.  Be sure to register via the links at the bottom...

I just realized that I never blogged that Girish and I are doing a webcast for the XRM Virtual Users Group.  The event is tomorrow morning.  There are so many platform topics to cover.  This initial session will be more of a basics session...

We’ve announced a couple of new events in the US for the Business Action World Tour for Chicago and Silicon Valley.   This is part of the series of worldwide events to help ISVs understand the potential of Dynamics CRM as a Line-of-Business...

Update:  Just kidding!  As many people quickly figured out from the many clues in the text and the date on the calendar this was just and amusing April Fool’s joke on my part.  It was amusing wasn’t it?  :) The news article below was...

The good folks at Colorado Technology Consultants (Julie and David Yack ) have kicked off a project to build a community around the Dynamics CRM line-of-business application platform (aka XRM).  “The XRM User Group is for the professional XRM developer...

I mentioned the CRM Incubation Week run by the US team.  That event was such a success that they are now planning a new event in Boston (April 20-24).  If you have an idea for a line-of-business application based business that you’d like some...