Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : UI

Connecting Silverlight to Dynamics CRM

girishr — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:33:26 GMT

As I promised in the channel9 video on CRM & Silverlight, I'm posting the sample code with a slight (3 weeks!) delay. Sorry folks.

For information on Microsoft Silverlight and its development, please view the Get Started page.

There are a variety of ways you can connect a Silverlight client to CRM. In the below example we're using a proxy approach by having a WCF service sitting in between Silverlight control and CRM web services.

1. Download the code

2. Download the public VPC and the below differencing disk containing the deployed solution.

Note: This source code and VPC is provided "as is" and without any warranties or support from Microsoft.

Creating a Silverlight control for CRM

3. Download the video

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave me a comment on this blog or contact me through the Email/Contact form.

Happy coding!

Creating a CRM WPF Offline Application

girishr — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:53:46 GMT

Windows Presentation Foundation (not Framework!) allows you to create rich interactive user experiences. If you've watched the channel9 video on using WPF with CRM, below code sample and screencast will help you to hit the ground running on WPF development for CRM.

Download the code

Creating a CRM WPF Offline Application

Download the video

Customizing Main Navigation of CRM 4.0 - Part3

girishr — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:02:01 GMT

In part 1 and part 2 of the navigation series, we saw how to customize CRM's navigation. Custom navigation along with custom entities, allows you to start creating Line of Business (LOB) applications in a variety of vertical industries. In the final part of the navigation series, we'll see how we can take the end result of simple customizations and deploy it on the server.

I've posted the sample customization files (entities and sitemap) for a simple professional services scenario as referred in the channel9 video here. You can download these file below

Download Entity customizations

Download Sitemap customizations

Please note that this is a sample only and NOT a real application for professional services.

To assist you in the process to getting started, below is a screencast that shows how you can import the entity and sitemap customizations into your CRM system.

Customizing CRM's Entity Model and User Experience

Download the video

Customizing Main Navigation of CRM 4.0 - Part2

girishr — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:05:23 GMT

If you have tried editing CRM Navigation as described in part1, you'll be more than relieved to know that there is a tool that'll act as a GUI editor for the navigation.

It is called Demo Tools and it is available for download here:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Demonstration Tools (for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0)

As the name states, it is a great set of tools for CRM mainly targeted for delivering a demo. But hey, nothing stops us from using it is for development! I'll have to plug-in the standard disclaimer that it is not supported through Microsoft Technical Support.

The tool has a bunch of features besides Sitemap editing like string replacement, dependant picklists, etc.

The major takeaway here is that it makes editing Sitemap a breeze. You can open existing Sitemap XML files and visually edit them. Once you've made the changes, you can save it back to the XML file.

The tool also takes it one step further so that you can directly open the Sitemap from CRM, make all your changes and publish back to CRM without downloading any intermediate (.xml,...) files. See those buttons "Open from CRM" and "Publish to CRM" in the above screenshot, that's what they do.

Customizing Main Navigation of CRM 4.0 - Part1

girishr — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:51:49 GMT

While we're posting the Channel9 videos, I thought it'd be good to get back to basics and show how we built some of the components in the demo. With CRM's entity/relationship system under the hood, it is very easy to create "xRM" applications that looks completely different. For example in the screenshot below, to the left is the out-of-box UI and on the right is how you can modify it with simple customizations.

We did a few things to the navigation here

Added additional navigation items like Time and Expense, Projects, Knowledge Center, etc.
Renamed Sales to Business Development.
Removed the out-of-box Resource Center.

Let us look at how a developer can go about to do these changes. There are couple of ways you can do that.

Changing Sitemap.xml

All of CRM's main navigation is stored in this single file. The way you edit is you goto Settings -> Customization -> Export Customizations and export "Site Map". The sitemap will download as a compressed file and you can modify the .xml within to change the navigation as you like. The tool I commonly use is either Visual Studio 2008 or one of the advanced notepad editors like Notepad++.

Details on the SiteMap schema can be found here within the SDK. Most importantly, if you screw up the navigation, check out this section on how to recover from errors. You have got to bookmark this. Trust me, I've panicked number of times without realizing I could recover.

However editing Plain Old XML (POX) is not a favorite thing to do. In the next part, let me show you a tool that simplifies this into a much easier process.