09 August 2006
Caching Tool
Hello CRM-Friends!
I just made a new version of the caching tool for Microsoft CRM. Instead of an annoying system tray application it now resides in the system as a windows service. It is now running in the background but more important there is now a delay between each ping so the activity of the caching service will not disturb your work or maybe your presentation. For the first roundtrip there will be only small delay (10ms) but for every following roundtrip you can specify the delay between each ping in seconds in the config file.
What is the caching tool?
The caching tool is a small windows service which speeds up Microsoft CRM. Thanx to god, Microsoft CRM is using caching techniques to ensure a perfect user experience and a rapid-responding application. On the other hand it takes a few seconds when starting Microsoft CRM for the first time. But these few seconds could be very long especially when you are doing a presentation. The caching tool pings each relevant URL and as result Microsoft CRM seems to be faster, because some of the data is already loaded into the cache. You can use this tool not only for Microsoft CRM, any web-based application might be used.
How to install: Download the installation file here: CachingTool.zip and execute the setup.exe. During installation you will be prompted to enter the user account the service should run. E.g.: contoso\gerdf. It should be the user which you are using for demoing Microsoft CRM. Enter the password two times and complete the installation. The Service will automatically start after system start up but for the first time, you have to start the service manually by typing “net start cachingservice” into command box.
In the installation folder of the service (“CRMTools/Caching Tool”) you could specify additional settings. The URLList.txt is used to specify all the URLS you would like to ping. For each URL use one line. The URL could be complete like http://contoso/index.aspx or you coudl use a space holder in the URL “{0}” to let the service replace it with the DefaultServer which you could define in the config file.
If you are interested how the service works just download the source code here: SourceCode.zip
Please let me now if you find any errors, even errors in the text of my blog.
Greetings, Joris
