Tech Tips, Comments and Curious Stuff

I wonder, is all the Buzz around social networking justified? Besides tageting the consumer market, would it really provide business value? .. would having a direct integration with, lets say, CRM, with a social network (e.g. Facebook) provide real value...

Ok, so here it is ( download ); I finally had the chance to finish this sample and put it in a form that others can learn from. Various folks both from the Silverlight team and the CRM team were involved in the process of finding ways to make it work...

With the release of UR2 we provide developers a more convenient place to put their custom ASPX assemblies. As the SDK points out, whenever developers want to host their custom ASPX application within the context of the CRM web app they should put their...

So you or one of your users is getting an error in CRM and the error message doesn't give you any useful detail of what may be going wrong... where to next? Before you jump into any forum or send any email with that useful "contact your system administrator...

So here I am working on the specs for new exciting CRM5 features and exploring some scenarios. As part of my research I was exploring some features of Visual Studio and realized that some developers may not know that they can make their lives a lot easier...

With the CRM 4.0 enhancements to the plug-in and workflow engine as well as the introduction of the web based workflow designer I've seen many CRM developers asking the same question: When should I use workflow vs. plug-ins? The answer is “depends”; the...

CRM 2011 allows developers to natively use Silverlight applications to extend the user experience. One of the main use cases for Silverlight apps is to embed them into CRM forms to provide extended controls or visualizations. While natural for experienced...

I always like to keep up to date and observe “trends” that emerge in the webosphere. Yesterday I spent some time looking for “cool” websites (I was mostly looking for new UI paradigms/controls). It was so funny to find a 2005 Time magazine list of the...

Feels good to be back. After ~2 weeks of vacation I’m back to the office and felt like blogging a bit he he. Let’s see if you find this post interesting. By now many of you had already had the chance to play with CRM 2011 Beta. One of the...

So here I was, trying to make a ListBox in Windows Phone (Silverlight) scroll properly and for some reason, the thing just wouldn't scroll ok, sometimes items would stick in the middle, sometimes forcing the layout to update worked sometimes it didn't...

For those of you that are wondering about UC “presence” on CRM 4.0 · Presence did make it to RTM :)... pretty cool actually. · The client machine needs communicator installed and running · Only "systemuser” and “contact” entities will show...

Relationships in CRM 4.0 are quite powerful but hard to understand at first. There are so many moving parts tied to so many places that it is sometimes difficult to predict what the actual outcome is. So here is my attempt to explain a bit further what...

Like a couple thousand employees I'm too developing a few windows phone apps on my moonlight time J . It has been a pleasant surprise to find the tools and training material to be quite useful, if anything I would expect that a bit more structure and...

It’s all about Apps these days isn’t it? The new App to have fun, to read news, to find stuff, to purchase stuff, to connect with others, there is always an App for “that”. What is the main reason to see such an explosion in the...

I've been building a demo for upcoming CRM5 presentations by putting together several extensibility features, things are coming together pretty nicely. Couple of issues on the build did slowed me down but should be fixed soon. Anyhow, this post is about...

Well, with CRM 4.0 out the door and a couple of days off I had a chance to update my old CRM-Silverlight demo. Although I did add a small animation the basic functionality remains the same. The bulk of the work was to update the code to make it run with...

Q: Is there a way to directly call CRM 4 from Silverlight 2 managed code using the auto-generated proxy? A: Yes :) with a small workaround that will be available with SL2 RTM. I finally had a bit of time to spend on a matter that personally bothered...

If you are wondering what entities are eligible for which types of relationships , wonder no more, you can determine that programmatically using the Metadata API. For RC0 we added a couple of new messages (documented on the SDK) that will make CRM customizers...

In my first post in this blog I want to show a screencast of a small, not so discoverable, yet important feature of Titan, the ability to rename the navigation areas of the Out-Of-The-Box entities. Basically you need to export ISV.config, modify it and...

The last 3 years of a lot of people's work have been released and it ROCKS! The CRM 2011 beta is live! http://www.crm2011beta.com/ Beta is a quality, feature complete release of CRM 2011 that will help us fine tune the last set of pieces for the official...

What’s the news you say? People have been programming the Web with HTML + JS + CSS for decades yet it is only now that we’ve started seen a new breed of applications that for practical purposes are indistinguishable from native apps: Fast...

A couple of years ago, back in my home country, one of the main projects that I worked on (as a programmer btw) was a “reverse proxy” that we called “redirector”. Fundamentally it was an ISAPI filter for IIS 5/6 that reverse proxied internal HTTP sites...

I’ve received a fair amount of inquiries about how to do a Silverlight Screencast so I decided that it would be good to make a post about it. Here are the quick steps; these are not “official” steps but what I did to make mine work based on documentation...

This may be common knowledge for most people out there but I bet there are also many that don't know how to take advantage of this. When I was preparing my demos for PDC I ordered an external hard drive, to store many VMs, and an extremely fast 32Gb flash...

When you try to upload a customizations file (xml or zipped) into CRM 4.0 RTM and get the message: " Either the file couldn't be uploaded or this is not a valid customizations file " it probably signals that there is something wrong with your XML; you...