Nominated to .NET-Awards

Nominated to .NET-Awards

Hi y’all!
My parental leave is soon at it’s end and this thursday I will be back to work in full force! Hopefully I will also have lots of interesting topics to write about aswell!

.NET Awards will be held this thursday here in Sweden in the Stockholm suburb of Kista. The solution I have been working with since I started at Logica, ICE42 for ICE.NET, a Swedish Telecom Operator, has been nominated and we will hopefully win!

If you are fluent in Swedish you can watch a move with my colleague Mats Jonasson and the CIO of ICE.NET Thomas Norberg as they talk about the solution. Unfortunatley, I was ill the day of the recording, hence, I am not in it.

.NET Awards 08 Nominerad: Logica Sverige AB
.NET Awards 08 Nominerad: Logica Sverige AB

Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Architect

Logica Sweden
www.logica.com

CRM 4.0 launch and more…

Yesterday Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 finally launched and there was a big Microsoft happening i Nacka Strand close to Stockholm. The location was great, only about 100 m from my office :).

At the launch there was a blog corner where both Jonas Deibe and Michael Höhne were answering questions and drinking som coke. I took the opportunity to have a look at Michael’s (http://www.stunnware.com/crm2/) filtered Lookup a bit closer. I had read some about it on his page and it is really a great piece of software. In short it enables filtering of lookups and in CRM even the intellisense. It is not yet fully supported by Microsoft, but Michael mentioned that it soon will be.

I also got the opportunity to talk to Jonas Deibe a bit and we talked mainly on what the differences in developing extensions are between CRM 3 and 4.0. I will go deeper into some of this in later postings.

I also got meet some of my Microsoft Dynamics CRM friends from Cybernetics, Cinteros, SysTeam and of course, Microsoft Sweden. I hope we’ll meet again soon.

As I have described earlier, we at WM-Data (Will formally be named Logica from feb 27:th) are so busy at the moment that we have to de prioritize some customers, which I find very sad, since I don’t like to disappoint anyone in general and customers, in particular. So, if you are a good Microsoft CRM developer and interested in working with really big customers with very interesting projects, concerning complex integration and other interesting customizations in an international organization that is really employee-friendly, please contact me and we can have a chat! My office is in Stockholm, but Logica has offices all over Europe and even in India (Bangalore).

Thats that for this time, hope to be back soon!
Stay in touch!

Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Consultant

WM-Data/Logica CMG
www.logicacmg.com

Busy, busy + SDK

It has been some time since my last entry and it is mainly due to the fact that I am currently involved up to my ears in two large integration projects with Microsoft Dynamcis CRM 3. Very interesting and demanding but the problems we are facing are mostly project specific and not anything I believe you would find interesting and my customers probably wouldn’t want me to talk to much about. When I run into something that I think will be of interest, and I have the time, I will of course let you know.

Personally, I havn’t had much time to dig into CRM 4.0 yet but I noticed that the SDK has been released. You can find it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=82E632A7-FAF9-41E0-8EC1-A2662AAE9DFB&displaylang=en

Happy coding!

Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Consultant

WM-Data/Logica CMG
www.logicacmg.com

WebServiceStudio 2.0

SOAP is a great thing, not only does it get you clean, but it is also the foundation for most modern webservice communication. It is supposed to be platform independent.

A good thought but does, however, seem to have it’s limitation. To be able to thoroughly understand the communication between the client and webservice a good program is needed that can help you study how the web service works and how the SOAP-messages are sent and received.

When working in a .NET environment, a .NET based client is very advantageous and a business partner of mine at the company Lemontree, Oskar Mattsson, suggested a very good application. I havn’t had time to try it out fully yet, but it is also a GotDotNet-project so you can also read the code of how it is doing it’s calls.

The name of the program is WebServiceStudio 2.0 and you can download it here:
here

Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Consultant

WM-Data/Logica CMG
www.logicacmg.com

Fake lookups = unsupported

My colleague Daniel Westerblom at WM-Data asked my a question concerning the fake lookups that I have referenced bellow and that I know are commonly used by many partners. The question was if these customizations are supported.

When I was at convergence I asked this explicit question to, I think it was, Clint Warriner (CRM Escalation Engineer at Microsoft Support) and he gave me confirmation on what I had suspected, that these customizations are not supported. They fall under the last point concerning unsupported customizations described in the SDK:
“The use of custom HttpModules to inject HTML/DHTML into the Microsoft CRM Forms.”

Since the HTML DOM is modified, this is not supported.

The reason for this is most probably that Microsoft might choose to change this in future releases of CRM (for instance CRM 4.0) and might also have internal scripting references to objects they expect to be there according to the standard HTML DOM.

I don’t know if these fake lookups will upgrade from CRM 3.0 to 4.0 without problems. If you have any experience of it, please let me know.

If you have any comments on this subject, please feel free to comment bellow. I always publish comments that concern the subject and are not directly offensive. (I have activeted moderation on comments just to avoid comment spamming).

Gustaf Westerlund
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Consultant

WM-Data/Logica CMG
www.logicacmg.com