by Gustaf Westerlund | Oct 26, 2007
Now Convergence is over and I feel stuffed with info and experiences. There is so much I would like to write about and so little time. I will try to spread it out a bit.
During one of the sessions Clint Warriner, an Escalation Engineer (he writes hotfixes) held a very interesting chalk-&-talk about CRM system maintanance and performance best practices.
It was crammed with goodies, and I will write more about it later, but one interesting thing he talked about was the possible delay in loading forms. He said this, most often, depends on the SQL server. When loading forms the list of which reports are relevant and so on, are also loaded from the Reporting server. This can, in some cases, take some time, and in some bad cases, really afect the load time of forms.
They have created a hotfix for this, that can be requested from Microsoft support (no cost) if you give the referece: KB 941592. It simply caches the information on what reports exist so that the request to the SQL-server doesn’t have to be executed every time.
I will get back to the subject of performance tuning later.
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Sep 21, 2007
Silverlight is a new product from Microsoft that can be viewed as the same sort of plug-in as for instance Flash, Java Applets or ActiveX. There are two feautres that make it stand out from the rest, namely:
– Vector based graphics built on the new Windows Presentation Foundation (a part of .NET 3.0). The definition of the GUI is definied in a langauge called XAML.
– From Silverlight version 1.1, you can write managed code. In other word you can finally start working with C# or VB.NET on the client side instead of the irritating language javascript.
These two features make the foundation for a more user friendly and more rich experience of using the web, something at least I have been longing for. Being able to use managed code/CLR-code, will make web development a lot easier and speed up the process of making more robust and reusable programs.
On the CRM Team Blog you can download an example of how silverlight can be used in conjunction with Dynamics CRM 3. I saw that some people had had some problems with it, and I havn’t had time to test it myself yet, so be advised.
Here is the link: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2007/06/19/crm-and-silverlight-integration.aspx
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Sep 16, 2007
The most common way of requesting a specific hotfix for Microsoft Dynamics CRM or SharePoint is to call Microsoft Support (they cannot be downloaded directly). However, there is also a webpage where you can request a hotfix online. Have a look an add it to you favorites, you will probably need it.
https://support.microsoft.com/contactus2/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1410&WS=hotfix
Gustaf Westerlund
Microsof CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Sep 16, 2007
As I mentioned before, when I was working with the company Cybernetics, there is a way of creating false lookups when it might not be possible to do so normally (for instance system-system relationsships).
The blog http://andrewn23.blogspot.com/ describes in detail how this is done, so, if you are interested, please have a look. This technique can of course be enhanced in many ways.
Also, I am not certain if this technique is supported since Microsoft might decide to change the way some of these more internal pages (lookupsingle.aspx) work, hence breaking the customization.
The blog also mentions some hazards of using allcolumns that are very worthwhile reading (I like to use them to increase development time and change to specific attributes when I get performance issues).
So, take some time and have a look at it, I am however sad to see that the last entry was in october 2006.
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
by Gustaf Westerlund | Aug 10, 2007
When creating javascripts in general and when working with AJAX-based javascripts (javascripts that access server based information) specifically, it is not uncommon to update attributes in CRM-forms. If these attributes are “Disabled” using the form-editor or are disabled using javascript in with the following code:
crmForm.all.xxx_myfield.Disabled = true;
Then any updates to the data of this field, will NOT be saved when the form is saved. There is a way to bypass this and this is to set the attribute to “Read only” instead, with the following javascript code:
crmForm.all.xxx_myfield.readOnly = true;
This will disable any editing of the field by the user, but any data that is modified will still be saved.
I have some other stuff I will share with you soon aswell.
Gustaf Westerlund
CRM and SharePoint Consultant
Humandata AB
www.humandata.se
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