Jonas Deibe - Dynamics CRM, C#, JS : Document

New SDK available

Jonas Deibe — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:21:00 GMT

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82E632A7-FAF9-41E0-8EC1-A2662AAE9DFB&displaylang=en Downloading . . .

or Online http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb928212.aspx

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

Jonas Deibe — 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

Demo online

Jonas Deibe — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:16:00 GMT

Great place to find cool and usefull solutions

http://www.democrmonline.com/

Tricks and tips for documentation

Jonas Deibe — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:55:00 GMT

Document your project is a definitive must to-do but not always the first thing a developer thinks of. It’s something everyone knows is required but in the end something that might be done on the last project hours of the project budget, right? Well there are some things you could do to speed up documentation and semi automate this process. First you need to set the documentation level. Are you required to document on field level or is it enough to explain on a higher level what your new entities or callout classes are supposes to do? If the code is well written I personally don’t require field level documentation and a higher explanation (story) would be enough to understand what your solution is doing (or suppose to do). You also have the possibility to add your comments when adding fields in MSCRM during customizations. This data is stored in the metadatabase and could be exported to excel if wanted.

Solution architect overview - file as vsd is attached in this post

Since I first announced that I would write how-to deliver documentation as chm files I received a note from my friend Michael Höhne telling me that’s “old stuff” and he already blogged about that. So you made this post and I ref your excellent 3 part story.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

For editing you chm files you could import the NDOC generated files to HTML help workshop. Here you could edit and add not generated information from NDOC. I recommend adding the vision template (save as GIF) and add under Solution Architect chapter.

Once you compiled the chm file you have almost (or same) professional look a like of documentation as MSDN.

Suggestions on topics for you project SDK

+Your name of tool
 -Gettings Started
 -Screen shoots of solution
 -Flow – sales process
 -Flow – marketing process leads
 -Flow – ....
+Architecture Overview
 -Solution Overview
 -Namespaces
 -Technical Architecture
 -Source Control
+Logical Database Diagram
 -Overview
+Deployment
 -Deployment Process 
 -Entity type codes (if you have different setups of CRM servers)
 -Client settings (Policy) 
 -Integration
 -Javascript
 -Debugging
+Database
 -Index and tunings
 -Reports
+Callouts
 -Customer.Crm.Callout (your NDOC generated class documentation)

Adding new pages to HTML help workshop is an easy task. Below html is an example for MSDN look a like page that works nice with the NDOC generated files. Modify above (attached) architecture.vsd to your solution and save the file as Architecture.gif. Copy the file to the HTML page folder and compile it in the HTML help workshop project.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<head>

<TITLE>Platform Architecture</TITLE>

</head>

</td>

</tr>

</table>

</div>

<h1 class="dtH1">Solution Architecture v1.0</h1>

</div>

<BR>

<H1><A name="hist"></A>Release History</H1>

<BR>

</FONT>

<hr>

</div>

</body>

</html>

Example of added html file to HTML workshop editor

Final word from an quote by Dave. I'm not sure I agree but some parts of me laughts :-) Happy documenation

“Software is usually accompanied by documentation in the form of big fat scary manuals that nobody ever reads. In fact, for the past five years most of the manuals shipped with software products have actually been copies of Stephen King's The Stand with new covers pasted on.” - Dave Barry