Ok; so maybe I got a little overexcited in the final installment to this 5-part series.  <Jazz Hands!> This time around we spend time talking about how to use Silverlight to build experiences that will compel users to want to come back again and again while differentiating your application from those of your competitors. In this episode we spend most of our time in the part of the demo related to the conference attendee portal.  The portal is meant to be the place where returning attendees…[more ]

In this episode we talk about a variety of topics including using Silverlight for UI, composing using 3rd party web services and storing complex information in Dynamics CRM. We spend most of our time on the flight booking page.  This page was built using Silverlight to demonstrate some of the simple experiences that can be designed.  In this case the UI was built in Expression Blend.  Designers and developers work together closely on projects.  In fact, developers and designers work on the exact…[more ]

In this episode we dive into some of the real code behind Wide World Importers Conference site.  Girish walks us through the code-behind for the contact/profile and conference registration options pages. There’s not really a lot of magic here.  In fact, I would say it’s quite simple to understand.  If you’ve used ASP.NET before it’s not much different when you’re writing for Windows Azure as we are here.  The only difference is that here we’re sending the data to Dynamics CRM using the SDK. …[more ]

In yesterday’s episode we very briefly touched the identity and authentication part of the demo where, on the self-service site, the attendee registers using Windows Live ID.   In this episode we go a lot deeper.

Identity and authentication is hard.  Simple, scalable and secure login capabilities require a great deal of experience to build and a great deal of effort to maintain and keep running.  Windows Live ID provides you a proven solution for building identity-aware applications and is used today by over 460 million users.

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Girish and I dropped in to the new Channel 9 Studio (formerly Monaco) to record a few Channel 9 episodes around some demo code we’ve been working on for a few months. 

In this series we’ll focus on self-service and specifically on building self-service sites that use Dynamics CRM on the back-end to enable customers, employees, citizens, etc. to get the information or perform the tasks t…[more ]

I was mesmerized by this simple but cool Microsoft Surface demo at last fall’s Convergence conference in Copenhagen.  Lachlan Cash was kind enough to let me post the video here as a great example of how touch can transform visualization and manipulation of complex line-of-business information.  The demo during Kirill Tatarinov’s keynote session shows top-down heat-map visualization of the bins in a warehouse.  The color-coding gives an immediate view into the status of the warehouse with blue…[more ]

I couldn’t help but think about the old Kermit the frog tune while chatting with Jennifer Pollard (Product Manager) and Neil Huizenga (Software Developer) last week about the new Environmental Sustainability Dashboard for Dynamics AX.  While many organizations are doing everything possible to reduce their carbon footprint and improve the efficiency of the resources that they do use, it is often difficult to measure progress.  With the recent economic downturn and pressures to report emission,…[more ]

While at the Convergence conference a while back I bumped into Michael Fruergaard Pontoppidan (Principal SDE) and Morten Jensen (Program Manager) from the Dynamics AX team.  Both Michael and Morten are based at the Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC)  and have worked on Dynamics AX since the first release. Morten and Michael worked on the version control feature in Dynamics AX.  I more or less dragged them over to a table at the conference and grilled them on how it all works. In AX 4…[more ]

In this video I chat with Andy Bybee (Principal Program Manager Lead), Allen Hafezipour (Senior Program Manager) and Nirav Shah (Senior Dev Lead).  These are some of the folks on the Dynamics CRM team thinking hard about code on the server.  We chat about how to write custom code in Dynamics CRM and have that run securely in the various deployment models available including on-premises, partner-hosted and even in CRM Online.[more ]

While at PDC back in October, Ryan Dunn and I had a chance to sit down with Shan McArthur from gold ISV partner ADXSTUDIO to discuss what he'd learned from his experiences with the Azure Services Platform. 

Shan is a serial early adopter and Ryan and I (and a few other Technical Evangelists) have been working with him and his team for some time to help them along the way.

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