On November 17 the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) kicks off in Los Angeles and xRM & Microsoft Dynamics CRM will be there to make sure you have a good show.

For those who don’t know what PDC is, it is the definitive Microsoft conference that showcases and gives you a roadmap of what’s coming out in the future from Microsoft.

This year xRM/CRM will be highlighted in the keynote speeches and in two break-out sessions.

Andrew Bybee is presenting a session on Developing xRM Solutions Using Windows Azure and Nirav Shah is presenting on Managing the Solution Lifecycle for xRM Applications

If you’re involved with CRM & xRM in any capacity, you must hear Andrew Bybee (a.k.a Andy) speak. Both Andy and Nirav work in the R&D team and are responsible for the core features of the platform, so make sure you come with your list of questions.

During one of the sessions, you’ll be able to catch a really cool demo that I’ve been working on recently . It is a demo that integrates CRM, Azure & .NET Services together and I’ll spare the details for later.

You will also have the first opportunity to touch and play with CRM ‘5’ at PDC09. That’s right! At the hands on lab section in the Expo hall, my team has been working hard to have two hands on lab showcasing the Visualizations and Solutions packaging feature of CRM ‘5’.

Of course I’ll be there at PDC with a camera for Channel9 interviews. So if you have some interesting development work to show, make sure you flag me down.

See you in LA!

Today the first public release of Windows 7 will be available to all MSDN Subscribers. I’m truly excited about Windows 7 as it a game changing platform in many aspects.

Today, you will be able to download all Windows 7 Client (x86 and x64) Retail and VL Editions – English only on MSDN subscriber downloads. Along with this, you can also download language packs, WAIKs, WDKs, SDKs, and symbols in all available languages.

To support the variety of languages and builds, 893 different images are being released to MSDN Subscriber Downloads in three waves through August 21^st.

And while the download is going on, don’t forget to checkout the Windows section on Channel9.

http://channel9.msdn.com/windows/

Note for RC users: If you’re still using the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) release, license expiration messages will begin on Feb 14, 2010 and it will time-bomb (shutdown every 2 hours) starting March 1, 2010.

For subscribers who receive media, the media for Windows 7 will be included in the November shipment.

Happy downloading and installing!

Get ready for the coolest developer event on the planet. Coming to Los Angeles again, PDC09 will be held from Nov 17th – 19th 2009.

I had a blast at last PDC and I really look forward for this year’s event. One of the reasons I really look forward is because we’ll definitely be talking about xRM. Titles of a few talks this year are published on the site’s ‘Sessions’ area. Note that we’ve only published a sub-set of ‘Sessions’ and there is many more to come. So stay tuned.

Developing xRM Solutions Using Windows Azure

You might ask how you can keep up with all the updates and sessions announcements. We’ve got an answer for you in feeds. When you’re on http://microsoftpdc.com make sure, to check out the RSS/ATOM feeds and subscribe to the ones that you’re interested in.

http://microsoftpdc.com/WhatsHappening/RSS

http://microsoftpdc.com/BehindTheScenes/RSS

http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/RSS

Registration for PDC 09 is now open. Register by September 15th at http://microsoftpdc.com/ and get a $500 early bird discount. Not bad, huh.

We’ll see you soon in LA.

Here is an interesting video that’s informative as well. It’s Friday evening after all , so chill out and enjoy this really nice & simple video that Steve Marx created to explain “What is Windows Azure?” with simple terms and hand drawn sketches.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:feec9c5d-c6c9-451c-aa9a-b7f4524a6322&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="What is Windows Azure?">Video: What is Windows Azure?</a>

Now that was a great, wasn’t it. Check out Steve Marx’s blog post that goes into much detail on how he created this video.

Maybe it’s time for me to fire up my tablet pc again. I’ll soon tell you about an interesting way in which I use my tablet pc.

I was really surprised when my twitter account http://twitter.com/girishr had a large number of new followers over the weekend. Now I know why.

After I caught up with my RSS feeds, I realized Menno did a great job of compiling the “influential” Microsoft Dynamics CRM people on twitter. You can see the list of people in the Dynamics CRM tribe twibe here

http://www.tekoppele.com/Blog/post/2009/07/17/20-Microsoft-Dynamics-CRM-Twitter-Users-You-Should-Follow.aspx

Menno,

Thanks for the honor. You’re now the official keeper of “List of twitter addicts in the CRM community”!

Time to get back to CRM evangelism, 140 characters at a time!

Today, at WPC, we announced the business and partner model for the Windows Azure platform. Here are few highlights from the announcement.

• Commercial availability at PDC 2009 in November.
• SQL Azure will be available as a cloud-based relational database platform built on SQL Server.
• Free until the release in November. Now is the time to go check out the free CTP.

You can sign-up for the free CTP account for Windows Azure & .NET Services at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/register.mspx. SQL Azure will be available later this summer.

The basic pricing that we announced today is in the table below. As part of the Microsoft Partner Network, partners receive an additional 5 percent promotional discount.

More details on pricing are available here on Windows Azure Team Blog.

Ben and I took some time to chat about this really neat demo that shows how you can combine the Microsoft Web Platform with Dynamics CRM to quickly build and deploy self-service solutions.  This is a 5-part “Dynamics Duo” video series and you can view the full set of videos below and also be sure read more about them on Ben’s blog .

I’m sure many of you will remember the “conference” demo that we showed in the Business Action Virtual Tour and also from the demo that Ben did in Convergence keynote last year.

Recently Ben and I had the opportunity to sit down in B20 and chat about the demo in much detailed fashion. We figured that we might as well turn on the camera so that you all can watch it as well and perhaps maybe learn a thing or two about CRM & Cloud platform from Microsoft!

Cross-posting from Ben’s blog. Enjoy!

Dynamics Duo Rides again

The CRM VPC available on download.microsoft.com has been a wonderful resource for not just demos but development as well. I’m sure many developers are using it for building their prototypes and in some cases active product development.

Note that the CRM VPC on MS downloads will expire tomorrow (June 11th 2009).

Make sure you download the new CRM 4.0 VPC from the PartnerSource link below:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Virtual PC Image (April 2009)

We are also working on modifying the CRM Developer Rampup Kit to be based on the new VPC. The new content will go live within a few weeks.

Phillip Haase has worked hard in building this VPC and has put together a nice article about this VPC on the CRM blog.

How do I know when my VPC expires?

Many have asked me how to find out the expiry of the variety of VPCs they have in hand. To find this out, simply type winver in command line or “Run” prompt within the VPC and it’ll tell you when the VPC expires.

Now try this on the new CRM VPC. As you can see the new CRM VPC also has an expiry date.

I know this can be frustrating for some of you but I wanted to explain why we keep doing this over and over again. We (as Microsoft employees) have legal obligations to release only time-limited or evaluation copies of software when we release them as a public VPC. That said, we definitely want to make things easier for you to begin your development or show a demo. Please let us know if you have any specific feedback or suggestions.

Tomorrow Shan McArthur, Ben Riga and I are presenting a webcast for XRM virtual user group. It is a basic 100-level session with some interesting demos on using CRM 4.0 and Windows Azure in the context of self service portals.

When: May 28, 2009 (Thu) 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM (PST)

Self-Service Sites: Proactive and Effective

More than ever applications built for the web connect customers (or partners, employees, or citizens) directly to systems running behind the firewall. Whether for informational or transactional solutions like customer portals or loyalty program sites, it is imperative that information gathered is acted upon as soon as possible while keeping costs way down. In this session we’ll explore how building on the XRM platform and taking advantage of Windows Azure, Live Services, and SQL Data Services provide a great platform for building proactive self-service web sites that effectively manage the end-user experience.

You can find more details about this event at http://www.xrmvirtual.com/events/self-service-sites. If you wish to attend this session, please sign up for free at XrmVirtual.com and also check out a number of upcoming presentations in the events section.

See you tomorrow in the webcast and come prepared with your questions!

Today, I had a simple question. Are the customizations schema (the exported .xml file) compatible across different update CRM 4.0 update rollups? Meaning, if I export a set of customizations (.xml) from a server that has UR2 (Update Rollup 2) installed, can I import that on a server having UR4? And how about the other way around?

Turns out that update rollup 2 and beyond are actually compatible with regards to customizations schema. Note that the only exception to this is UR1.

This KB article has lot more details about this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968176. Below is an excerpt from the KB article.

Notes about exporting and importing customizations

• The server from which you are exporting the customizations has no updates installed or has Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed. However, the server to which you are importing the customizations has Update Rollup 4 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed.
• The server from which you are exporting the customizations has Update Rollup 4 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed. However, the server to which you are importing the customizations has no updates installed or has Update Rollup 1 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 installed.

Last week I had the opportunity to present four webcasts as part of the Business Action Virtual Tour (BAVT) wherein we discussed about building line of business applications using the CRM (XRM) platform and how you can extend it to create compelling experiences (using WPF & Silverlight), reuse familiar skills (using Office Platform) and how to provide the power of choice to your customers (using Azure platform).

If you missed any of these events, don’t worry; we recorded all of them and have it available for you free of cost. Ben Riga was handling the Q&A during the session and has also posted a nice summary of the Q&A as part of his blog post. I’d encourage you to view the high fidelity version of the Live Meeting replay.

1- XRM, the Line of Business Application Framework

2- Compelling experiences (WPF & Silverlight)

3- Familiar Skills (Office, SharePoint & UC)

4- The power of choice (Azure Services Platform)

So set aside just four hours of your time, get the projector, crank up the volume and gather all your colleagues around . It’s show time!

The second CRM Incubation Week was another great success with 5 innovative XRM solutions built during the week.

During the week, I advised SmartRedPen from the Boston area that is working on a solution for second language teachers. Though it sounds like a simple solution, Jennifer and Bolivar from SmartRedPen explained to me the intricacies involved and how huge the market potential for their solution is.

What is most interesting to me about the XRM platform is the grassroots innovation it brings about. All that SmartRedPen did to begin with is pick up David Yack’s XRM book and download the CRM VPC to get started in building a business application on the XRM platform. They didn’t have to go through lots of training or complex processes to start building their application!

Luckily for them, we found several Microsoft platforms built on XRM, WPF and Silverlight that gave them a head start for their solution. Couple of interesting ones we discovered during the week include

Microsoft Semblio – A .NET based educational toolkit allowing you to create rich, immersive multimedia learning material.

SCE Starter Kit – Remember the amazing New York Times Reader built on WPF? Now what if you had the source code to that application platform? That’s exactly what SCE starter kit is. It includes the SDK to build great reading (& multimedia) experience in your application. A recommended download for all .NET & WPF developers. BTW, NYTimes Reader has a free edition, so that’s a recommended download for everyone!

Below are the companies that participated in the Incubation Week and built a functional solution in a week’s time.

So if you are a developer working in a startup or wish to join/create a new startup, I strongly encourage you to checkout XRM platform to quickly build and deploy your business application/solution. Also check out the Bizspark program that offers tons of software and resources for startup companies.

Sanjay Jain has detailed blog coverage of the entire event here: http://blogs.msdn.com/sanjayjain/archive/tags/Incubation+Week/default.aspx

Please feel free to leave a comment or use the email form to send us any questions you have or if you wish to participate in a future CRM Incubation Week.

The recent announcement that SharePoint Designer (SPD) will be offered for free makes me very excited. Being a SharePoint consultant not long ago, I can truly appreciate how the free SPD & WSS will revolutionize the content management space. When the announcement came out that this change was effective from April 1st, I had every reason to suspect the legitimacy of it but looks like it was all real!

SPD allows you to build a variety of things starting from designing simple websites (remember FrontPage!) to wonderful dashboards that revolutionize enterprise solutions.

While working on the “Dynamicss Duo” CRM 4.0 demo, we made heavy use of SPD and the results truly speak to the power this tool has.

In the above screenshot, one can see a heavily customized SharePoint page Iframed into CRM. Using SPD we built this Intranet style dashboard pages with connected webparts and also using a set of pre-built 3rd party webparts.

If you had seen the CRM demo that was shown at the Day1 Keynote of PDC2008, you can see the below attractive customer portal that doesn’t look anything like SharePoint but it actually runs on SharePoint Online and was built using SPD.

SPD allows customizing such SaaS SharePoint extranet sites even when you don’t have physical access to the server.  In the above screenshot, the gauge display is actually a Silverlight control running in SharePoint, and the webpart to the right is called a dataview webpart that connects to CRM web services. Dataview webparts are a very powerful feature of SharePoint as you can easily build data bound webparts and SPD allows you to build it without writing any code.

This is just a tip of the iceberg and developers are free to deliver a variety of custom portal solutions, extranets, intranets, internet-facing sites, collaboration solutions, social networking sites, and internal applications on top of the extensive capabilities of SharePoint. Integrating these with Dynamics CRM makes it even more compelling and presents a good business opportunity for providing value-added solutions to your customers.

Seems like WPC08 was just a few weeks ago but WPC09 is already upon us. This year WPC is at New Orleans from July 13th through 16th.

Every year, top Microsoft partners are recognized and honored with “WPC Awards”. There are several categories of awards includes the coveted awards

• ISV/Software Solutions Partner of the Year
• ISV/Software Solutions Innovation Partner of the Year
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner of the Year

Partners can nominate their solution/company for these awards and do so immediately as the nomination ends April 9, 2009 at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

If you don’t know what WPC is, it is a partner event that provides a fantastic opportunity to connect with Microsoft folks and other ISVs or Partners just like you.

I also noticed that registration for WPC 09 is now open and you can register here: https://partner.microsoft.com/global/trainingevents/wwpartnerconference 

These days unborn babies and even plants start to socialize early enough through social networking sites! So check out the below links to “socialize” during WPC this year :-)

http://twitter.com/wpc09

http://www.facebook.com/pages/WPC09-July-13-16-2009-New-Orleans/50554356818