Jonas Deibe - Dynamics CRM, C#, JS

Time to move on

jonadei — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 12:51:00 GMT

This is my last blog post at this blog since I’m leaving Microsoft.

I have had many great years at the software giant evolving my knowledge and contributing to products and really cool customer projects both local and global. I been part of sure step development, community work, Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint 2013, WindowsPhone, Solutionframeworks, Digitalmarketing, local programs and lastly the Services Technical Leadership Program (STLP) Thanks Microsoft and Thanks to all customers!!

It has been a great time but now is the time to move on. I will join Sweden’s biggest insurance company www.folksam.se and have only 12minutes bicycling to work and that’s for me priceless :-)

You can still follow me on twitter http://twitter.com/jdeibe or my personal website www.kristinochjonas.se or contact me on http://www.linkedin.com/in/deibe

Thanks!

Jonas Deibe

Techfest 2012

jonadei — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 19:08:00 GMT

Today friday night and techfest has release some amazing new videos and apps

http://fetchclimate.cloudapp.net/app#SM&/ty&1&/years&1961&2012&58.755706&19.317802&58.675836:0.054528:59.766393&16.790946:0.129639:19.38372&56.820748:0.066572:58.152179&17.690115:0.087067:19.431448

Fetch climate -> really cool, lets see how its looks on my favorite swedish holiday island. Hmm looks like its on the east side we should hangout. We tend to stay in the middle and on the west coast.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=159525

IllumiShare enables remote people to share any physical or digital object on any surface.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=159487

Holoflector is a unique, interactive augmented-reality mirror.

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/?id=160684

Wearable Multitouch Interaction is a depth-sensing and projection system that enables interactive multitouch applications on everyday surfaces.

I'm happy that we recently connected to direct fiber to our house... Since it was not cheap I sold it to my wife - you know our kids need high broadband for future services like "holygrams" or "schoolwork" looks like the & in R&D gives us some direction where we are headingI

"Invalid Pointer" -after upgrade to WP7 Mango Toolkit

jonadei — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 21:11:00 GMT

I started to upgrade my WP7 app Trafiken Sverige to latest version of windows phone "mango" and got caught in an ugly #bug

Basicly what I done was upgraded my project type to 7.1

Get latest Toolkit (NuGet)
Re-build (Work fine)
Run App

Bonk! Failure -hmm after lite investigation I found out it’s my name of controls I added to my templates in longlistselector and wrap panel (se example below).

Simple solution is to remove my"name" in xaml and use "tag" instead.

Works fine!

{"Invalid pointer "}

[System.NullReferenceException]: {"Invalid pointer "}

_data: {System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal}

_HResult: -2147467261

_innerException: null

_message: "Invalid pointer "

_methodDescs: null

_optionalData: null

Data: {System.Collections.ListDictionaryInternal}

HResult: -2147467261

InnerException: Could not evaluate expression

Message: "Invalid pointer "

StackTrace: Could not evaluate expression

<toolkit:LongListSelector.ItemTemplate>

<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>

Tag="{Binding Path=Details.Key}"

Name="{Binding Path=Details.Key}"

Width="160" Source="{Binding Details.Url}"

VerticalAlignment="Top"/>

</StackPanel>

Building WindowsPhone 7 app

jonadei — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:41:16 GMT

Puhh long time ago I posted something here.. been busy on different projects and yes you know.. time and time. But I'm still alive and very active :-) have been playing around with WP7 this summer and the result could be found here http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/apps/be27b928-84b2-4be3-84f9-3ced2b1261e7

Go deep or broad as an architect

jonadei — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 22:19:00 GMT

I recently had the chance to meet Anders Hejlsberg during the Service Technical Leadership program. He is an amazing man with a great work story and currently the lead architect for the C# language.
During the meeting with him and some more technical fellows he got a question.

How should I as an architect evolve?

Figure 1: My made-up topics over a timeframe

So the math is simple!

1. Go Deep on one topic

2. Go up and pick another topic

3. Re-start from 1

If you do this interaction for a while, guess what? -Now you are deep and broad J

Out on the road to Redmond

jonadei — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 13:37:05 GMT

After parental leave things have been busy... Start-up myself, recap what’s happened during my parental leave (wow CRM 2011 looks really good + all the cloud services)

The coming week I'm attending SLTP training in Redmond, very excited and looking forward.

Back after a long parental leave

jonadei — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:05:42 GMT

Starting computer, enjoying drinking caffé with adults (no screaming around or fighting), doing QRP...

Yes I'm logged in again :-)

Techready 10 from my office

jonadei — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:06:00 GMT

Kids are sleeping, Wife is training, Techready 10 is online, doing alright on CS and wine tastes great!

It's not like being onsite but with technology I can do 3 things at the same time ;-)

Today February 27, 2010 -> 6 years ago . . .

jonadei — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:34:00 GMT

I remember this test very well. It was one of the first MS CRM certificate rounds and the questions where harder to understand than the test itself...

Time goes fast when you have fun, right J

Offline pictures

jonadei — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:44:00 GMT

Ehh just need to add two pictures taken recently during my parental leave.

This picture is taken from a number plate on a car. In Sweden we have a three letter combination and 3 numbers making the car unique. I guess I’m unconsciouslymissing work…

My friend claims it’s from the 60’s and found inside a printer. It's a memory! Talk about “hardcore” J

Ranks Microsoft as Leader

jonadei — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:58:00 GMT

The report is under the title of Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Application Servers

Buy vs Build

jonadei — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 09:19:00 GMT

Buy versus build judge yourself! I would think xRM as a way of accelerate application development.

Costs

Benefits

Buy (xRM)

Locked to vendor

Locked to vender schedules

Customizations to fill GAPs (if any)

Licenses

Configuration more than development

Faster go to market

Use vender enhancements

“Standard”

Shop GAP’s as modules or vertical solutions

Build (.Net or any other langauges)

Expensive

Longer delivery cycles

Harder to rapidly change

Innovation

Tailor application bit by bit

Re-use existing infrastructure

Better control over developer process

Checkout the introduction to xRM for some inspiration http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yru5CkANOKA

TIP! VHD to store your CRM samples/code between your WIN7 and VPC images

jonadei — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:37:00 GMT

I recently started to use a VHD image to store my CRM samples/documents/setups in order to have them flexible available anywhere both on my main OS (win7) and Virtual images. The VHD can then be shared to multiple computers by using Mesh (Great service if you dont use it yet please try!) making the image available to colleagues/friends ect. I also enable bit locker on the disc to protect my sensible data. Big-up to Nicklas Håkansson for the orginal tip!

For you who don’t know what a VHD image is please have a look here

1. Start by opening disc management (create and format hard disc partitions)

2. Go to Action -> Create VHD

3. Locate you storage for the VHD and name it “mesh.vhd”

4. Set the size to for example 500mb and Dynamically expanding

5. Right click you newly created disc and “initial disc”

6. Change to GPT if discs are greater than 2TB. Lease default setting MBR for this example

7. Right click you disc and start the wizard “New Simple Volume”

8. Exit and open explorer

9. If you would like to enable bitlocker right click the newly created disc and start the encrypting.

10. Once the Bitlock is enabled add the VHD to your Mesh folder

11. Done!

· My custom setup available both in my main OS and VPC’s

· Enable Bitlocker on disc to protect data

· Shared to multiple computers by using Mesh

Note! you need to attach the VHD if your machine is rebooted, this can be scripted and automatic started on OS boot!

select vdisk file=c:\vhd\mesh.vhd
attach vdisk

Save the script to a file and add a schedule work with arguments C:\Windows\System32\diskpart.exe /s c:\VHD\attachdisc.txt

Ensure that you take the best technical approach to deploying Microsoft Dynamics

jonadei — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:07:00 GMT

Not only because I been involved in the development of these services, they add value :-) Please check oút at

http://www.microsoft.com/Microsoftservices/bizapps_ad.aspx

Code review has been pulled out but could be done by partners

Mission-critical workload of 50,000 concurrent users

jonadei — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:56:00 GMT

Feels great! Checkout press release on http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2009/jun09/06-03IntelMSBenchmarkPR.mspx

All business transactions were based on extensive customer research and defined using the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance and Stress Testing Toolkit.

CRM developer toolkit v1

jonadei — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:47:00 GMT

A new toolkit to make customizations to CRM 4.0 has been released. Download bits from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/E2DevTkt

View All CRM Entities - Displays a listing of CRM entities that are dynamically available from the CRM Explorer within Visual Studio 2008
Create and Update CRM Entities - Allows for creating new entities and updating existing entities from within the CRM Explorer experience
Create a Wrapper Class - Provides the ability to auto-generate wrapper classes for entities, which exposes the CRM entities and their corresponding attributes as classes and properties respectively to enable development of code to interact with the entities
Generate Plug-in Code - Enumerates the available Plug-ins for an entity and generates the code necessary to jumpstart the plug-in development process
Integrate the Build and Deploy Process - Simplifies the process of building and deploying a CRM solution
Deploy Across Multiple Servers - Assists in deployment and maintenance of Windows installer packages across multiple environments

The E2 team would also like to encourage Toolkit users to submit comments, suggestions, or other general thoughts about extending Toolkit functionality to better support the efforts of developers in planning, developing, customizing, and maintaining on-premise deployments of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. To initiate or participate in Toolkit discussions, In Code Gallery, please see visit the Toolkit Discussions tab at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/E2DevTkt/Thread/List.aspx

My current suggestion list looks something like this

Suggestions for more features
Automatics SDK generation (.chm or other formats)
Plug-in registration (automatic)
Entity relations ship generation (similar as the SDK app to generate Visio ERD schema)
CRM settings from visual studio add-in (link or properties)
All possible deployments (CRM online, partner hosted)
Storage of Javascript customizations and automatic process to remove blank CHARS ect in file to minimize size (minimizer)
Storage for database tunings (custom index ect)
Storage for modified or custom SSRS reports

Techdays Radio

jonadei — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:05:00 GMT

Local post about Techdays a first time event located in Västerås (Sweden) http://www.techdays.se

Myself being interviewed for podradio by Dag Köning http://buzzfrog.blogs.com/techdays09/2009/03/techdays-radio-jonas-deibe-service-line-architect.html We talked about CRM, Sharepoint and Performancepoint (Swedish). Later during the day I was presention a field experince session about "Making CRM and Performancepoint work for management"

Dynamics Crm 4.0, MOSS och Performance Point för dashboard reporting
{ Jonas Deibe } Service Line Architect, Microsoft Services

This session show how to build great management reporting solutions when combining the use of PerformancePoint Server 2007, MOSS, custom code and CRM 4.0. The session includes real customer presentations from different CRM implementations and shows the potential for creating reporting solutions with KPI's not yet seen by the solutions on their own. This is what Microsoft is all about!

Språk: svenska
Produkt/lösning: CRM
Nivå 300

The slidedeck + code samples will be uploaded and attached to this post as sone I have cleared it with techdays administration

New CRM Sdk

jonadei — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:21:00 GMT

Context plays an important role when it comes to parent-child pipeline execution and this is now better explained in latest SDK release (4.0.8) other highlights are a new walkthrough: Server to Server Authentication with CRM Online
Download http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82E632A7-FAF9-41E0-8EC1-A2662AAE9DFB&displaylang=en
Online version http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc151083.aspx

A glimps in the Future

jonadei — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:54:00 GMT

As you watch this video montage from 2009, look for examples of how current prototypes may evolve in the years ahead. When you’re done, tell us what you think and what you’d like to see in the technology of tomorrow.

Source http://www.officelabs.com/projects/futurevisionmontage/Pages/default.aspx

Do fast customization with metaservice

jonadei — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:19:00 GMT

How many times haven’t you added your customer enmities or attributes with the CRM tools? They are all good but if you are an expert why do not take your customization experience one step further? The Metadata Service Web service contains the messages that you use to read or write the definitions for all the entities in a Microsoft Dynamics CRM installation. The metadata service exposes the same functionality as the web-based customization tools but again if you want to take your customization experience one step further. The Metadata Service Schema doesn’t change therefore your could use the proxy assemblies to access the functionality. Do not forget to include the namespaces

Microsoft.Crm.Sdk;
Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Metadata;
Microsoft.Crm.SdkTypeProxy.Metadata;

MetadataService meta = CrmServiceUtility.GetMetadataService("http://localhost:5555", "Stockholm");

try

{

DateTimeAttributeMetadata date = new DateTimeAttributeMetadata();

date.SchemaName = "new_FromDate";

date.DisplayName = CrmServiceUtility.CreateSingleLabel("FromDate", 1053);

date.RequiredLevel = new CrmAttributeRequiredLevel();

date.RequiredLevel.Value = AttributeRequiredLevel.None;

date.EntityLogicalName = EntityName.customerrelationship.ToString(); //Change to entity to add attribute on

CreateAttributeRequest createAttribute = new CreateAttributeRequest();

createAttribute.EntityName = EntityName.customerrelationship.ToString();

createAttribute.Attribute = date;

meta.Execute(createAttribute);

//Add code to publish or do publish all manual in webGUI

}

catch (System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapException ex)

{

Console.WriteLine("Request Failed.\n {0}", ex.Message);

Console.WriteLine();

}

The above example code doesn’t work since the entity I tried to add the custom field doesn’t support customizations. My basic tough was to add a date field on the Relationship entity by using the metaservice since you don’t have the choice in web GUI. Unfortunately it didn’t work L But if you change to another customable entity it all works fine. I also used the Crm SDK 4.07 CrmServiceUtlity.cs file as ref

TR8 in Seattle

jonadei — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 18:11:00 GMT

If you are attending the Microsoft technical readiness (TechReady) conference this week in Seattle please drop by on my session. I’ll be speaking about field experience in making CRM and Performance Point Work for Management.

MSDY313 - Field Experience in Making CRM and Performance Point Work for Management
Session Day/Time: 2/5/2009 12:45-14:00
Room: (Sheraton) Metropolitan A

Tips for faster and better performance on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

jonadei — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:51:00 GMT

There are many different factors that affect performance when implementing a CRM system; the hardware, network, infrastructure, business processes, system configuration, ect. Finding those bottlenecks and identifying their actual causes can take a lot of time and might not be an easy task.

In this post, I’ll show what to look for based on my experience from global and local CRM implementations.

Latency

When deploying MS CRM in a WAN environment, a major consideration is the distance between the server(s) and the clients in the solution. As the distance increases, the delay, or latency, associated with each round trip can also increase.

For example, for a connection between a user located in London and a server located in Stockholm, the associated round trip time is 15ms, but were the user located in China, the connection to the sever in Stockholm would require approximately 300ms.

Because downloading a CRM page can consist of multiple roundtrips, the latency associated with a particular connection can directly affect CRM performance. For the example above, a CRM page required 10 round trips to load, the user in London would see the page in less than 0.150 seconds (ten times 15ms), while the user in China would have to wait for 3 seconds (10 times 300ms).

As a result, the fewer the round trips between the client and the server, the better CRM performs.

What is the best way to account for latency during solution design? My experience indicates that during the early phases of a project, it is critical to identify any potential areas of the solution that that might require extra roundtrips. Then, if possible, limit or build smarter functionality for those areas. Try only to render what’s in context or what the user needs at the moment. Perhaps have a verification triggered manually rather than during each onload of the CRM form?

Question every requirement and think about how that specific function might have impact on performance. Using third party tools such as WAN accelerators has been successfully implemented as noted in the Optimizing and Maintaining Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 documentation. The use of caching on the client is also a trick and make sure all static files are marked correctly in the IIS. Crunching and removal of white spaces improve performance in jscript added to forms. There are multiple tools out there to be used and could be part of the build process. Usage of the offline client might also improve performance if the client is used in offline mode and later background synchronized back to the server.

I hope that IE 8 will support more ports open during the load of pages. Currently IE can only have 2 ports open per domain. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 does not support the possibility split files on separated domain to have IE open more ports and then load files more in parallel.

Adding IIS fronts closer to end-users but still having a centralized SQL server does not show any better performance from my experience, rather surprising the performance was worse using that approach. What’s doing great results are adding custom indexes to DB and I would recommend using the different DBA tools available and monitor where to add new indexes.

Centralized vs. De-centralized Topology

When deploying MS CRM in a WAN environment, you can opt for a centralized or decentralized topology. A centralized approach Using a de-centralized (federated) The two types of typology are described and compared in the following table:

Topology	Description	Pros	Cons
Centralized	CRM servers consolidated in a central location	A fully centralized infrastructure is easier to manage and maintain; consolidating resources carries lower TCO and procurement costs.	Query performance suffers from long distance access; retrieving data from remote locations significantly impacts processing speed and data latency
De-centralized	Local CRM servers are distributed around the globe	Users benefit from considerably faster query and reporting; local adoption of the solution at management level will typically be easier	Considerably higher procurement, operations, and maintenance costs; much greater difficulty in maintaining alignment of local solutions to a standard. Data volumes transferred to local implementations have high, concentrated impact on the network

Hardware Planning

What about hardware then? When planning for hardware selection, I consider the following points.

§ Number of transactions per hour – Total average number on key entities used to support business process.

§ Number of concurrent users – In global implementation user amount might be high but not all working in the system at the same time. Take advantage of the time zones. Don’t forget that outlook client talks to the servers regularly depending how you setup your synchronization.

§ Amount of customizations – Workflows, plug-ins do we need to have dedicated SDK servers? In CRM 4.0 you can separate as shown in the following table:

Services	CRM Application Server	CRM Platform Server
Web Application Server	ü
Help Content Service	ü
SDK Service		ü
Asynchronous Service		ü
Discovery Service		ü
Deployment Service		ü

§ Availability and failover – Clustering on SQL, farm on application and web fronts. Don’t forget Reporting Server! The more you secure uptime on your system -the more servers but better sleep and happier users

§ Central vs de-centralized – De centralized requires more hardware as noted above

Figure 1: Sample of suggested server topology, this is just one example, and depending on the scenario, another topology might work better.
Customer environments are unique and each implementation requires analysis and consideration of the variables in specific scenario.

Additional Information

Optimizing and Maintaining Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ba826cee-eddf-4d6e-842d-27fd654ed893&displaylang=en

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Performance and Scalability White Papers
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5852B14A-394C-4898-8374-CAF5E6479EB0&displaylang=en

Support for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957054

Planning a Deployment Topology (SSRS)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms157293.aspx

Happy New Year

jonadei — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 03:03:00 GMT

I would like to wish you and yours a very happy and prosperous New Year!!!

Looking forward for next year and more blogging

Skål, Cheers :-)

Hosted CRM movie

jonadei — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 19:10:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I was invited for a recording about hosted CRM. The movie is part of an education package giving partners an overview of some of Microsoft’s products and solutions. Peter Alvmo, Daniel Akenine and MVP Mikael Nyström were recording movies as well. Topic's are all from benefits by using Vista to Cload services. See all movies here

Happy Peter doing the CRM overview recording

The result could be viewed here.. and it’s in Swedish. I will in a later post add my CRM samples included in the demo.

CRM, Performance Point and MOSS (CRM+PPS+MOSS)

jonadei — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Extending CRM with BI capacity has been on the radar for a while and with the new BI accelerators this will be an easy customization. The same applies to CRM and MOSS integrations. Since I have spent some time in this very interesting area I tough why not share some parts (screen captures). My goals was to build an application with Sales support (CRM) extend it with document management/collaboration (WSS/MOSS) and analyses, drilldown reporting plus dashboards (PPS)
The end application would be fully integrated and user navigation will be from the CRM client. Since its all installed on-premise authentication is single sign on (SSO). One very important goal is to let the end user not to know what underlying product she is using, it just doesn’t matter as long it works and supports the end-users business/processes.

The first step to do is to install the software. I use two servers and a client in my lab.
• Installation domain controller and Exchange (Server1)
• Installation SQL Server, AS for OLAP’s, Reporting Service (default port 80), CRM server (port 5555), MOSS Server (random port NOT default web 80), Performance Point Server (Monitoring), Visual studio (Server2)
• Installation of Client with Office package, Visual Studio (Client)

The installation process might take some time so don’t expect to install it all on an afternoon.
Details on how-to configure each product is not in scope of the blogs post (might be a later post)

The end result is a very powerfull application; below you see some screen shoots

CRM Webclient, Sharepoint site and PPS webparts rendering Dashboards from OLAP cube

Sharepoint Document Library. Context menu about to open workflows on current document.

Drill down to product from opportunities, all depending how the cube has been designed

PerformancePoint Monitoring SDK
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb848116.aspx

Working with Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175367.aspx

MOSS Developer center
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa905503.aspx

CRM 4.0 sdk
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa477293.aspx