CRM Anywhere

Microsoft recently announced details of the next upgrade to Dynamics CRM entitled “CRM Anywhere” and this will definitely push xRM as a development platform for mobile devices.

It will include support for all the major browsers including IE, FireFox, Chrome and Safari and the most exciting aspect is support for native apps on Windows Phone, iPhones and Android.
With this release you will be able to develop applications confident your users can access it from a variety of browsers and devices. More details here

SQL Server Saturday Dublin 24th March

Well done to the SQL Server User Group in Dublin who have organized a great day of SQL server talks taking place on 24th March.

This is a community event and free to attend with many of  the world top sql experts speaking.

More details and registration here   Well done all involved.

Dev Day II Follow Up

I am realy pleased with how the day went we had almost 60 people in attendance all day and feedback was excellant. 


Anybody interested in speaking please let me know

Josh Holmes explains what HTML 5 is all about.

Dev Day II Cork - Line up finalized

We have a great line up of speakers and topics for Dev Day II in Cork on Oct 10.  This should be a great event with the opportunity to hear from some real world experts. 

The timetable of talks is below and Microsoft have kindly sponsored the event.  Attendance is free however you must register here to attend 

 

Speaker	Topic	Start
Josh Holmes	HTML 5	11:00
Vikas Sahni	Demystifying SQL Azure	12:00
Lunch		13:00
Bob Duffy	SQL Denali Power Overview	14:00
Kieran Logan	NoSQL Architecture  using Azure Storage and Lucene.Net	15:30
Coffee
Andrew Woodcock	ASP.Net MVC	17:00
Niall Flanagan	Understanding Database Behaviour for Developers	18:00

CRM 2011 - How to refresh a form after subgrid changes

SubGrids are a great improvement which were added in CRM 2011 that allow you to easily add a grid of related entities to a form rather than navigating from the left menu. Here is a simple example of how to refresh the parent form when an update to the subgrid has occurred. 

Running virtualized CRM 2011 on Windows 7

One of the problems when you want to run a virtualized version of CRM 2011 on Windows 7 is that virtual pc does not support 64bit operating systems and virtual server does not run on Windows 7 not at least without some hacks.

When I was faced with this problem I toyed with the ideal of installing Windows Sever 2008 and Hyper V however I decided to give VMware Player a go. I must admit I was presently surprised with how easy it was to get up and running and natting worked without any configuration. Added bonus is that it is free. I would definitely recommend it.

If you have existing VHD images that you want to convert to a VMWare VMDK virtual hard disk  then  I would recommend wimimage which allows you mount hard disk images and converts them. http://www.winimage.com/

I believe VirtualBox is also a good tool but I have not had a chance to try that yet.

Dynamics 2011 Online - Custom Reports using FetchXML

If looks like FetchXML which went out of favour with CRM 4.0 has made a comeback and you need to use it you want to write a custom report for the online version of Dynamics 2011.  This is because you don’t have direct access to the database and crm's filtered views. 

Microsoft have provided an extension for BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio) which allows you to connect to CRM online and write FetchXML based reports. BIDS is a cut down version of Visual Studio with just the reporting writing components installed. You can get the extension from here
 

Once you install the extension you can use it to create datasets in your report by writing FetchXML. Unfortunately you cannot use it to modify any of the system reports because if you download one of these and open it you will discover it use sql rather than FetchXML.

If you are going to write a report from scratch there are a few things to note. The first is that you need to use an embedded data source in your report not a shared data source otherwise you will get an error when you import the report into CRM.  So add a data source to your report called CRM and add you online url as the connection string. Under credentials select the “Use this user name and password” and enter your live email address and password. 

I have not found a good tool for creating FetchXML that works with CRM 2011 online so one of the easiest things to do is to use advanced find in CRM to create a query and then select the Download Fetch XML option to save it to a local file and cut and paste this into your report query.