Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : Training

Business Action Virtual Tour On Demand

girishr — Wed, 06 May 2009 23:32:32 GMT

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!

A book on CRM Platform Development

girishr — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:38:12 GMT

I just got an autographed copy of the xRM Developer book that David Yack has published. I must say that this is a great resource for Developers and David has packed every ounce of his CRM knowledge into this book.

After you get the book, don't just read the book. If you glance through the pages you'll realize that this is a Developer book with plenty of code snippets. So get the jumpstart framework and code samples from the book website, sit in front of Visual Studio and work with the samples.

I'm sure David would have loved to embed video into many places within the book but unfortunately publishing technology hasn't caught up yet! For that lone reason, it is worth checking out the screencast videos that David is creating for out of the book experiences.

MVP tips within the book are equally valuable. Also remember to follow the blogs of the MVPs to get more tips and tricks.

I'm planning to read from cover to cover and I'd suggest the same for any developer aspiring to work on CRM. I only wish I had the time to do that right away :-)

Many thanks to Dave and Julie for bringing this book to the community.

Developer Ramp up Kit for Dynamics CRM 4.0

girishr — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 09:19:45 GMT

Many of our ISV partners might be familiar with the DPE Metro (formerly Ascend) early adopter training content that we used to ramp-up the partners on CRM 4.0 platform(code named "Titan"). We're now happy to announce that the materials are now updated and being released to the entire development community as Developer Ramp up Kit for Dynamics CRM 4.0. Any .NET based developer can use this kit to easily ramp up on the CRM platform and start building line of business applications well within a week's time.

The kit is available at the MSDN development center here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc720132.aspx

The kit includes

Presentation slides and videos: Twelve modules covering the different extensible aspects of the platform.
Hands on Labs: To assist in hands-on learning of each module. Lab manuals along with completed source code are included. Note that we have three different packages, one for each deployment model namely on-premise, partner hosted and CRM Online.
VPC environment: For practicing the on-premise labs.

No prior Knowledge of Microsoft CRM is required. Familiarity with the .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual C#, Jscript, Microsoft SQL Server and general web development is recommended.

The content has come a long way since its inception and has been refined and well tested in the field. Going back to 2006 with CTP2 build of Titan, revised completely for CTP3, the materials were delivered in-person to several of our ISV developers world-wide. Earlier this year, it was forked off and we created materials for the Software+Services scenarios focusing on CRM Online and Partner Hosted CRM.

We've listened to your feedback and the ramp up kit now unifies all of this into one single package that we hope will be a useful resource for our developer community. Many thanks to all those involved that helped in shaping up the content and releasing it. You know who you're!

Please let me know via comments or email if you have any questions or need any further information.