TIDBITS on the Microsoft Power Platform

I like using Outlook as an RSS Reader, but I have found that occassionally a feed stops working. I understand a bit of the root cause of this, but I am hoping that with later versions of Outlook we can get past this.

CTP 3 Announced for Dynamics CRM v5.0

The world is a twitter with the announcement of the Microsoft Dynamics 'CRM5' Tech Preview (CTP 3)

http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2010/mar10/03-25CTP3PR.mspx

Just one Button: LinkedIn and Dynamics CRM

Just a small bit of code placed in just the right place. Sometimes the biggest business benefit is not necessarily the biggest development effort. 

Marco has a great post about how to turn on access to LinkedIn within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

A small little button opening a world of possibilities.

Developing in the world of concurrency

For numerous years developers didn't need to worry about the complexity of creating multi-threaded applications in the PC World.  The availability of hardware and operating systems that supported multi-threaded applications just didn't exist.

Over the last couple of years this has now all changed. Multi-processors and multi-threaded support built into the operating systems of even the smallest computers increases the requirements for creating code that can take advantage of all that power and performance.

You can now, not only create pieces of applications that run concurrently, but you can also create situations where different pieces of the applications overlap, use asynchronus and synchronus services and even tap into different physical processing power at different times.  

If you consider a former tool to be one instrument (like a violin), then in today's development world, whole orchestras (violins, cellos, trumpets, sax, etc.) are being managed with symphonies of success being deployed.

Needless to say the failures can make quite a racket and the people who can detangle and fix this racket are a special breed.

Tools, Tools, and more Tools.

The Microsoft Research teams have been looking at some of the concurrency problems and are interviewed on Channel 9 about their discoveries.  Microsoft Research: Tools to Help Resolve Concurrency Problems 

Two little applications might be of interest for further analysis and learning. These include Cuzz and Featherlight

So Many Variables: Windows Server 2008, 64 Bit

One of the benefits of blogging is having a place to capture items that might be worth remembering when problems occur.

Recently Microsoft released a technical article on running Microsoft Dynamics CRM v4.0 in a Windows 2008 64 Bit Server environment.

Some of the Key Items include an

"Error message when you try to open the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Web application"

but the article also includes work arounds to many of the issues discovered in the field.

A few small format changes

A few small changes to format. I must admit I am amazed at all that SixApart's TypePad producct has offered me over the last five years. What a great company!

Feature Driven Development

For those of you who work within a Feature Driven Development model (FDD) there are a number of great resources on the whole subject area on this website.  

The CRM Configuration Manager

A big shoutout thanks to Daniel Halan for creating this little toolkit (CRM Configuration Manager) and for sharing it!!! and thanks to Joel Lindstrom over at Customer Effective for point it out as something useful to have.

Builds

Given our focus on builds and deployments to different environments I found this post by the team over at Inetium of interest.

Environment-Aware Custom Workflow Configuration

Duplicate Checking

Alas I received bad news today about duplicate checking. As it turns out if you have duplicate checking set to check on create and update AND you find a duplicate the system does not acknowledge or save your response. Needless to say the system will continue to check for duplicates even if you told it that the two items found are NOT duplicate.

There is a way to get around this.

1) Make your duplicate checking rules a bit more sophisticated.

2) Tap into some of the 3rd party code to "pimp" your duplicate checking rules.

Anyone else have any great solutions? I know we are not the only ones to run into the statement "that is how it is designed" 

Thanks!! 

Hiding a Section

We recently had the need to hide a section on a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Form. After review of four or five different options it was decided that this offered the best approach.

Why?

The number one reasons is because the option supports the need to move code between different environments and as such is much more Enterprise centric.

A big THANKS to Adi for posting.  

One small note: Just be aware that if you move sections around you might break the code.