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Dynamics Duo: Silverlight and Jazz Hands

Ben Riga — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:08:00 GMT

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 go to review information about the conference (maps, weather, schedule, travel ,etc). This would be similar to a SharePoint page but built with a consumer in mind so including animations, drag and drop and generally having more sizzle. <Jazz Hands!>

The information in the modules is coming directly from Dynamics CRM Online via web service calls. That information is data-bound to the Silverlight controls we used to allow users to display and manipulate that information. The ecosystem around Silverlight is exploding and as result there is a wide variety of controls that can be used to accelerate the design and development of solutions. In our case, much of the UI work on the attendee portal is based on a control built by a team led by Martin Grayson. Have a look at the various other controls available in the suite on the Blacklight showcase site. The full source code is available on CodePlex. Nice work on these, Martin! <Jazz Hands!> As we discussed in the last episode the separation of code and UI makes is easy for developers and designers to work together to build something cool really fast.

Girish promised to share the code for this on his blog here.

This episode is part of a 5-part series. In this series we’ve tried to explain how you can combine the Microsoft Web Platform with Dynamics CRM to quickly build and deploy self-service solutions. The full set of videos include:

Both Girish and I enjoyed recording this series. We hope you enjoyed them as well. If you have comments or suggestions for other topics, feel free to add comments below or email Girish or me (Ben) directly.

Sorry if I went a little over the top with all that Jazz Hands thing. <Jazz Hands!> :)

Dynamics Duo: Composition with Third-Party Web Services

Ben Riga — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:41:00 GMT

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 same project files but stay in their own environments; Developers stay in Visual Studio, Designers stay in Expression. We’ll talk a lot more time about Silverlight in the final episode of this series tomorrow.

In our example we use a third party web service run by ezGDS to present the conference attendee with a list of flight options. ezGDS takes care behind the scenes to retrieve that flight fare information from various global distribution systems including Amadeus, Worldspan, Sabre and others. The attendee sees none of that complexity since we’ve built all of that directly into our system. Even though the information coming back can be very complex, including ticket information and various inbound and outbound flight segments, Dynamics CRM easily handles storing this information in a custom entity.

Dynamics Duo: Wide World Importers Code

Ben Riga — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

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. That’s infinitely more useful for your customers as the information becomes actionable immediately. We should mention that, in this case, we’re using a 3rd party toolkit by Microsoft Gold Partner, ADXSTUDIO. Shan McArthur and his team at ADXSTUDIO helped us to put this site together and their toolkit naturally uses the CRM SDK. It abstracts the SDK it out a little more to make writing and reading the code even simpler.

We use the Live ID token that we’re getting from the Live ID service, as we discussed in the previous episode, to allow the user to retrieve and update their profile information. It’s the unique key, of sorts, to their record in the CRM data store.

Girish promised in this episode to publish the code so expect to see that soon on his blog. We’ll have to hold him to that. :)

Dynamics Duo: Everybody needs an Identity

Ben Riga — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:01:00 GMT

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.

In our case, since we’ve integrated Live ID into the system, we let Microsoft manage all the details related to identity and authentication. Live ID assigns each of our users a token that is specific to our site. That means Microsoft lets us know that the person coming to the site is the same person that registered. That token is unique to our site so that from the perspective of the user their privacy is protected (e.g. they cannot be tracked across multiple web sites). In fact, the token is the only thing the site will see. So even though the user may use an email address and password to login to Live ID the site never sees that unless the user explicitly provides that information (as in our example by typing it into a profile page).

The simplicity of this is just amazing. As a developer I just have to register my site with Windows Live ID and then redirect my users to the Live ID login page whenever I need them to be authenticated. Live ID handles the authentication and then redirects back to a page that I’ve registered. You can even brand the Windows Live ID login page that your users will see so that it will appear as if it is your own login page. Nice!

While Windows Live ID does a great job of helping me as a conference organizer to identify and authenticate my conference attendees, we also need to authenticate the Windows Azure site to the Dynamics CRM site so that they can exchange information. We’re obviously not going to have CRM licenses for all our self-service users (the thousands of conference attendees in this case) so we use a certificate on the Windows Azure site to ensure that only that site has access to the CRM data. Once the certificate is on my Azure site, we use a Live ID service account to handle the authentication between the two servers.

Dynamics Duo Rides again

Ben Riga — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:45:00 GMT

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 they want without having to interact with a representative.

We’ve talked previously about using Dynamics CRM as a platform to build general purpose line-of-business applications. Typically these are for users that are behind the firewall. When we’re talking about self-service we mean the wide range of users that are out on the internet that need access to that same information in the CRM data store.

In this episode we walk through the demo in some detail. The Wide World Importers Conference site we use here is the main site for a fictitious conference. The self-service part of this is entirely hosted on Windows Azure. As we walk through the registration process the information is retrieved and stored directly in Dynamics CRM Online. Naturally, as we’ve said in the past, Dynamics CRM is great at managing both contact and transactional information. We also look at how, by using 3rd party web services, we can compose new capabilities into our system. In this case we show how to integrate an internet flight booking service into the attendee registration process and then store that complex flight booking information in the Dynamics CRM data store. Finally we show how to use Silverlight to build a compelling user experience for a self-service portal. This one is pretty slick.

Dynamics CRM was customized here for the requirements of a conference organizer. In our case we used Dynamics CRM Online but it could easily have been CRM in an on-premises deployment (or hosted by any of the hundreds of Microsoft hosting partners) as long as CRM is set up in an internet facing deployment mode (IFD).

The self-service site is running on Windows Azure so we walked through the Windows Azure Portal for the site to show how Azure helps us to deploy, configure and manage the site. The interesting part comes when we talk about how to scale up or down a site to handle large or small numbers of end-users (depending on the need of the application). Here Girish and I got into a discussion of running a site like this from the perspective of capital expenditures (capex) versus operating expenditures (opex). There are many scenarios like the conference one where the site will go through peak periods of high demand but then drop back down to very low demand. In those cases buying the equipment to handle the peaks means you have a lot of expensive equipment running idle during the low periods. Azure solves that problem by giving the power you need when you need it for as long as you need it. Unlimited scale for rent, I guess you could say.

We’ll dive into each of the various pieces of the demo over the next few days so come back and have a look. Be sure to leave us your feedback below.

Using Touch in Line-of-Business Apps

Ben Riga — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:14:00 GMT

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 showing cold (i.e. bins with low pick rates) and red showing hot (i.e. bins with high pick rates). Multi-touch is fully supported on Surface allowing multiple warehouse staff to collaborate while manipulating the data to optimize the warehouse for fast picking.

It’s not clear to me that we’ll see many Surface devices in warehouses as that’s not the initial target market. On the other hand, as Kirill mentions at the end, this type of innovation gets much more interesting with the new Windows Touch technology in Windows 7. I can just imagine 60-inch multi-touch displays becoming the control centers of warehouses in the not so distant future. I hope that this sparks some ideas for how you might use touch in your line-of-business applications using either the Microsoft Surface or Windows 7.

Resources:

It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green

Ben Riga — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:30:00 GMT

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, the environmental sustainability dashboard helps organizations to run their business more efficiently as well as fund ongoing green efforts.

Jennifer talks about Microsoft’s commitment to the environment including making ourselves greener by reducing our carbon footprint and partnering with governmental and non-governmental (NGOs) organizations to to address larger global environmental issues. At the heart of this is technology.

The Environment Sustainability Dashboard is a part of that commitment. The Dynamics AX team has heard from our clients that they are feeling the pressure to report whether that’s for regulatory reasons or for reasons related to the greening of supply chains.

Jennifer shows us a great demo of how this dashboard built into Dynamics AX as a role center takes advantage of SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Services within SharePoint Web Parts. Out of the box the product provides 4 web parts showing energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, actual energy costs and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The KPIs are based on Global Reporting Initiative's (GRI) Sustainability Reporting Guidelines v3.0 (aka G3 Indicators); the de facto standards in this area. With this product a process as simple as paying an energy bill becomes an opportunity to capture information about energy consumption and as a result the ability to calculate the related greenhouse gas emissions.

Jennifer makes the point that “if you can measure it, you can manage it” and shows a couple of scenarios where being able to monitor energy consumption puts organizations in control of that consumption in order to reduce energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s a huge demand right now for partners and developers with knowledge in both environmental and ERP systems. The dashboard comes with just a few web parts leaving open the opportunity for developers to build this out much further (for example with water and waste consumption). Neil shows us how simple it is for a developer to dive into the Dynamics AX Application Object Tree (AOT) and modify the metadata in order to customize the system in just about any direction.

So yeah, I guess we did just make it a bit easier to be more green. Sorry about that, Kermit.

Related Resources:

Environmental Sustainability Dashboard product page
- Download (requires PartnerSource login)
Microsoft’s Environment home page

Dynamics AX Version Control

Ben Riga — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 01:18:00 GMT

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 we first introduced version control with integration to SourceSafe. In AX 2009, we introduced Team Foundation Server (TFS) support as well as a MorphX VCS a low –end home-brew version control. Michael walks us through the MorphX VCS feature showing how it integrates Check In/Check Out functionality directly into AX environment. MorphX VCS is included with Dynamics AX. The target for this low-end VCS is VARs maintaining numerous client system customizations on the same code base.

Version Control is just one leg of the Dynamics AX team’s commitment to Engineering Excellence. They’ve also integrated unit testing and best practices policy enforcement. The Dynamics AX team uses this integration themselves integrating with Source Depot (an internal Microsoft versioning system). They are looking at moving to TFS.

CRM “5” – Secure Code on the Server

Ben Riga — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:53:00 GMT

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.

Back in October I spent some time chatting with the Dynamics CRM team about some of the new features coming in CRM “5”. I published a couple of videos back then (here and here) but never got around to publishing this final one (sorry about that guys!).

In this one 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.

The current version of CRM allows code on the server (for plug-ins or workflows) and that code runs in full trust. That’s the primary reason why server code is not allowed on Dynamics CRM Online where you’re sharing the server with many other tenants.

There are a number of different areas where you might need to write custom code on the server; for instance, custom workflows, custom web apps, plug-ins. It’s not hard to allow that sort of thing. Where it gets tricky is allowing developers to do that in ways that don’t compromise security and performance.

The team talks about what they needed to think about to solve these types of problems (profiling, tracing, and managing security of numerous managed assemblies). They looked at physical (sandboxing) and logical (code access security) isolation levels. They divided the security problem into multiple layers:

1st layer is .NET code access security
then using Windows security: putting code within its own machine and isolating access to databases or machine services
and finally for multi-tenant environment preventing one tenant’s code from touching the data or code from another tenant

Nirav and Andy provide a great whiteboard architecture walk through showing how the security is implemented and how the message pipeline flows.

Allen walks us through some sample code to show how this works in an early build (of course this stuff could change) including how to insert tracing in your server code allowing you to see what happened when exceptions are thrown. There’s a new plugin registration tool that helps with registration and deploying of code on the server.

The message to the developer writing line-of-business applications on the Dynamics CRM platform is clear. While today’s server code model supports only full-trust the new code security now unlocks the ability to run the exact same code in all of the various deployment mechanisms.

By coupling that with the coming solution management features, building and deploying secure applications will get much easier. There’ll be no need for writing MSIs and constantly keeping them updated. There’ll be no need to think about which type of server deployment a customer will use. As a developer you get to focus on your application. The platform does the work related to security and performance management.

I think the power of choice just got more power. :)

Learning to build on Azure: One ISV's Experience

Ben Riga — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:22:00 GMT

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.

In this video Shan discusses some of the things he's done that helped him get there faster. Amazingly the team was able to get the ADXStudio Content Management System (CMS) ported to Windows Azure in a lightning fast 3 weeks.

He ported ADXSTUDIO CMS and their CRM Developer Toolkit so that they are now able to run in either on-premises, partner-hosted or Windows Azure. He also took advantage of Microsoft SQL Data Services (which is Ryan's favorite technology :) ) to store the content for the CMS.

Shan had a lot so say about what he learned when build his cloud-capable and scalable app. His app originally had a dependency on numerous Microsoft technologies including IIS, ASP.NET, SQL Server, Active Directory.

Windows Azure

He’s now betting of both worlds. He knows many of his customers will continue to use traditional deployment methods but for many more Windows Azure will be a great fit.

Some of his comments:

Hosting in Azure is different. You can’t always do the things you expect from ASP.NET since you're now in a sandbox
The first thing to learn is code access security code since Windows Azure doesn't run apps in full trust
A great way to learn code access security is to move into medium trust immediately (even while on IIS) to see the exceptions right away
Get devs to Vista and IIS7 and use the integrated pipeline
He talks about how to build applications that will run in either IIS or Windows Azure.
Shan’s team were able to get all of this cool stuff ported and working in just a few weeks.
Shan shows us a project built on the ADXSTUDIO CMS running on Windows Azure and in the Windows Azure dev fabric.

SQL Data Services

Shan’s team went with SQL Data Services (SDS) for data storage. He notes that Windows Azure also has some storage capabilities. Shan discusses why he made the choice he did to use SDS:

much richer query capability
easier to use for composition of multiple web sites
soon will have the additional security access control
will take on more and more relational capabilities

Since SDS is not full-fledged SQL Server there is a certain amount of re-architecting that Shan needed to do to ensure that his app was portable. He made some design decisions very early on in development that made this easier:

used a provider model to separate the data from the logic in the application
moved away from deep dependency on SQL Server (e.g. stored procs)
used guids/ unique ids (as opposed to using auto-numbered ints) for unique keys

Shan goes quite deep into the code showing how he takes full advantage of the provider model.

He also spends some time talking about how he tackles identity. Again because he uses the membership provider model he can switch identity based on the need of the application (Active Directory, Live Id, Forms Auth, etc).

Dynamics CRM

Shan’s team does a lot of work with Dynamics CRM as well. Shan’s team put together a very cool conference self-service registration demo application that uses Azure on the front end with the site content stored in SDS and the dynamic content coming directly via web services from Dynamics CRM. So, in the same way that Dynamics CRM can be used to build line-of-business apps that run on-premises, partner-hosted or in Microsoft data-centers with CRM Online, they can build customer facing self-service web sites that run in any of the 3 hosting models (on-prem, partner-hosted, Windows Azure). For Shan’s code it’s just a change in a web.config file.

I even managed to get Ryan on film paying off Shan for all the kind words he has for the evangelists that have helped him out. Gosh, I hope Legal doesn't see this. :) Seriously though, Shan has certainly done a great job of taking advantage of all the resources we provide to ISVs building on our platform. Thanks for the kind words and great product, Shan.

CRM "5": Deploying Line-Of-Business Solutions

Ben Riga — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:30:00 GMT

In yesterday’s video I chatted with a few PMs on the CRM platform team. We talked at a high level about some of the problems they’re trying to solve as they think about CRM “5. In today’s video we go a little deeper with Humberto Lezama Guadarrama (Program Manager), Elliot Lewis (Developer Lead), and Scott Head (Developer)

As I mentioned in yesterday’s video, don’t look for any schedule information in here. Also features and feature names may and probably will change before we ship. CRM “5” is still a long way away. We’re talking about this developer-focused stuff early to help developers with design and architecture as they think about future designs.

In CRM “4” you create components (entities, forms, reports, etc) and then there are various means to deploy those components into a customer’s implementation.

In this video we go deeper on a new concept in CRM “5” called solutions. Think of solutions as providing to CRM the same sort of capabilities that Windows has with its capability to add and remove programs and features.

The concept is quite powerful as it allows components to be layered on to the base system but also on top of other solutions (i.e. when there are inter-dependencies). It also provides a way to protect the intellectual property of the components in your solution. It also includes change management and versioning

In a sense ISVs that build on the CRM platform will now have the ability to package up their applications much like you would package up windows applications into MSIs.

Elliot gives a pretty good explanation of the architecture for how this is implemented. Like any good architect he couldn’t resist a blank white board and jumped up to diagram out the way a solution and components. He explains in a clear way how solutions layer on top of one another and still provide for versioning, uninstall and rollback.

Humberto gives us a lap around the UI for creating publishers (e.g. ISVs) and solutions. In doing that he gives a quick look at some of the new stuff coming in form design. That includes some cool stuff like drag and drop and sub-grids. Another feature is the ability to create lookup attributes. This one will save a lot of time and effort.

If, as Humberto joked, lookup attributes will “save you a thousand clicks” then another feature called global lookups or option sets will save you like a gazillion. :) It certainly will make ISV solutions much easier to manage. This will allow you to create pick lists that can be reused across many entities. I know there are many ISVs out there that have been doing this by creating their own entities but in many cases that leads to an inordinate number of entities (sometimes into the hundreds).

Humberto also gives us a lap around some of the new features in the page model. This includes a new way of presenting commands across the top of a form. Another thing that will get some attention is the dramatic reduction in the number of clicks and windows that end users will have to use to work with the UI. (“Less clickiness” :) ). Tabs have been moved to the left hand side and the tab sections have been moved to create one form. Again this reduces the clickiness of the app but makes for a much easier way to get to the information you need quickly.

You can already build some great dashboards on CRM data using SharePoint. Folks that have been waiting for way to provide that sort of capability directly to end-users will love the new inline charting (including pie, bar, funnel charts, etc).

Humberto left one of the more interesting features for the very end. The ability to add Connections to entities provides a way to sort-of tag entities and build unstructured relationships among entities in the system.

Update: Humberto’s Session at PDC where he discusses many of these topics is now public here. Full Disclosure: Humberto asked me to help him out with a demo in that session. :)

CRM "5": Chatting with the platform team

Ben Riga — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:49:00 GMT

This week at PDC the Dynamics CRM team is taking the wraps off a few select platform features coming in the next major release of CRM. A few weeks before PDC I sat down with some of the program managers and devs on the team to discuss a few of these features.

In addition to many new end-user and developer features introduced with CRM 4 there were numerous infrastructure enhancements made that enable some great new scenarios. CRM 4 added lots of good stuff including big pieces like multi-tenancy and 64-bit support. A lot of that work was around taking CRM 4 to the cloud and much of it was infrastructure or plumbing. Another important thing that happened with CRM 4 is that the idea of using Dynamics CRM as a platform started to take hold as it provided developers the ability to build line of business applications cheaper and faster

In this first video I chat with Andy Bybee, Humberto Lezama Guadarrama and Allen Hafezipour all program managers on the CRM platform team thinking about programmability and the developer experience. We talked about some of the thinking that went into CRM “5” (that’s a codename, by the way). Don’t look for any schedule information in here. CRM “5” is still a long way away. We’re talking about this developer-focused stuff early to help developers with design and architecture as they think about future designs.

The team is still committed to power of choice and so will continue to use the exact same code base across on-premises, partner-hosted and Dynamics CRM Online. The features that you see in revisions of CRM Online will fold into CRM “5”.

Since the folks I was talking to think mostly about the platform they had a lot to say about that. CRM “5” is not about building generic applications. The team has a laser focus on enabling the patterns they see over and over again when devs are building line-of-business applications.

One area they are thinking hard about is how to solve some of the problems that ISVs run into when building on the platform. A primary concern is simplifying the deployment and upgrading of applications and protecting intellectual property (IP) rights of those applications.

Another area you’ll see a lot of work in is the user interface. The team talked about the work done on end-user experience with the page model. They are working to improve usability and help with the density of information.

Andy talked a lot about cloud services. BTW, when we recorded this a few weeks ago the Azure brand had not been announced so we just referred to this generally as “cloud services”.

CRM itself does not run in Windows Azure (formerly known as Red Dog). Applications running outside the firewall would run great and be easiest to develop on Windows Azure. In the CRM world we refer to these as self-service applications. On the other hand, if you’re building line-of-business applications that would run behind the firewall those would run great and be easiest to develop on Dynamics CRM. Microsoft .NET Services (formerly known as “Zurich”) provide the glue that can pull those two types of applications together so that they can share information. The Azure Services Platform makes service-to-service integration much easier and safer by providing capabilities like identity, access control, relay service and workflow. Andy does a great job of describing on the whiteboard how CRM and .NET Services work together to build systems that avoid what Humberto calls the “funky stuff”. :)

Code on the server is a pain point today for devs trying to build applications on the CRM Online platform. Allen talks about some of the thinking that went into designing this core new feature. As you can imagine this sort of thing has important implications in so many other areas (coding, debugging, operations, monitoring etc). Also, although the thinking first started with the idea of getting code on the server for CRM Online, what the team has done actually provides important capabilities to all types of deployments.

We’ll go into a lot more detail on this cool stuff in a couple of other videos later this week. Stay tuned to this site for that.

WCF and AIF in Dynamics 2009: Chatting with Michael Merz

Ben Riga — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:56:00 GMT

In this video I’m back on the Advanta campus chatting with Michael Merz, Program Manager for Application Integration Framework (AIF) on the Dynamics AX team.

AIF is a standards-based framework that allows you to publish and consume web services. It’s used primarily in integration scenarios when connecting Dynamics AX with other systems. AX also has .NET Business Connector (BC.NET) for integrating with .NET applications. BC.NET is more for client side integration. AIF is all about web services and is completely standards-based. Under the covers AIF takes full advantage of .NET using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). For more complex integration scenarios AIF can also help expose services using MSMQ and BizTalk.

With Dynamics AX 2009, the team ships a bunch of services (about 60 out of the box) that are ready for use. That includes, for example, the more common scenarios like integration with sales orders or customers. AIF allows you to create, read, update and delete those sales orders while maintaining the integrity of the database (i.e. without directly touching the database at all). This is done independent of the transport so when developing you could begin by updating via http and later switch to MSMQ. This can be as simple as enabling the service then “generating” which generates the WCF interface (i.e. WSDL). That web service is then available to be consumed by any standards-based client (including apps written in php, java and naturally any of the languages in Visual Studio). You can also configure the service endpoints to change the binding or authentication parameters.

In the video, Michael walks us through using a standard Excel Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) project to consume a AX 2009 sales order service that is exposed using AIF. He also shows us how, by using WS-Addressing in the WCF headers, you can pass a target company for a web service call. By default, AX limits error messages coming back from the server for security reasons. Michael shows us how to configure AX to propagate those errors when you need to see them.

Dynamics AX is a rich platform for supply chain management and financials. AIF opens up AX so that ISVs can build on that richness by integrating their own applications. Sometimes when you do that you need to consume a web service exposed by external applications. We see here how you can plug external web services into the AX processes. In this case, Michael shows us how when trying to create a customer in Dynamics AX with a name that has been blacklisted by the US government (“Bin Laden”, for instance. Yikes! :) ) the customer create process calls out to an external web service in the cloud to verify the customer name. This seamless integration of external processes is a boon for ISVs that need those deep integration points. Michael explains how. In order to do this sort of integration you build a Service Reference in the Application Object Tree (AOT) to provide the parameters. AX takes care of much of work by generating the artifacts (compilation, deploying, bundling etc) that are deployed and executed on the server. CLR interop is available in order to use .NET DLLs and their classes.

Some code samples are available here:

Application Integration Framework Overview (MSDN)
Calling the Customer and Vendor Services (Dianne Siebold)

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Silverlight

Ben Riga — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:42:00 GMT

In yesterday’s video we talked about WPF and showed off some mind-altering 2D and 3D animations :). As we said then, WPF provides access to local data and resources as well as access to bare metal performance including 3D graphics acceleration. But you can’t take that sort of thing to the web. While WPF will run in a browser, that browser needs to be Internet Explorer running Windows.

Silverlight changes all that. Silverlight v1, which has been out for over a year, was primarily focused on media scenarios. Silverlight v2 goes much farther with numerous new features including a compact version of .NET. It’s now an ideal platform for building web-based line-of-business applications like the ones ISVs build today on the CRM platform. CRM and Silverlight 2: seems like a marriage made in heaven. If you’re looking for a way to light up your CRM applications, Silverlight is the way to go.

Silverlight runs in IE, Firefox or Safari across Windows and Mac. It will soon be on mobile devices (including Windows Mobile and Nokia). There’s even a project to get it working on Linux.

So bottom line; WPF is very rich, Silverlight is very reach. :)

As always, Girish delivers a demo that clearly demonstrates how Silverlight can take CRM farther. We continue the professional services scenario. In this case, a client has booked a new project and we need to figure out when it’ll fit into our schedule. That means we need to do some project and resource planning. Girish does that by dropping an iframe that includes a Silverlight control into CRM. When it loads it uses web service calls to pull in team member names and their project and schedule information.

The control displays that in an interesting way; showing transparent cylinders to designate the amount of available hours or capacity and then pours in the project schedule information to show which projects are currently scheduled to which team member. Adding all the team members makes for an interesting data visualization showing where we have time to add additional projects. Once you know that you can layer the new unallocated projects on to the graph. The power of Silverlight comes in when you start interacting with the data; moving unallocated projects around to ensure that we are optimizing staff resources while delivering projects on time.

Of course, the beauty of Silverlight and WPF is that they are so very similar. Learning one automatically gets you the other; giving you the ability to deliver both desktop and web applications as appropriate to your customer needs. User-experience design also becomes much easier as the workflow between designers (using Expression Studio) and developers (using Visual Studio) is well-thought out and seamless.

One interesting twist is that Silverlight 2 doesn’t currently support the CRM web services so it was a simple matter for Girish to add a WCF web service that bridges the two. Girish will be posting this code on his blog here. I know this because I have that promise on video. ;)

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and WPF

Ben Riga — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 04:05:00 GMT

In this episode The Dynamics Duo dive into the deep rich coolness that is WPF. We also spend some time talking about the offline data framework that Dynamics CRM provides developers.

In past sessions we built solutions on SharePoint and Office and those are great for the specific scenarios they were intended for. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) gives developers the ability to build rich interactive smart clients. You’ll have to admit that nothing beats the inherent coolness of a well written WPF app. I’ve worked on a few WPF projects (here and here) and it never ceases to amaze me the way you can reduce complexity and immerse users in the experience.

If your solution requires a desktop apps then WPF is absolutely the way to go. If you’re building web apps then Silverlight is the right way to go. When you’re not sure then you should think a little harder about your requirements. Things like access to local PC resources require WPF. Also if you’re doing heavy graphics that would require graphics acceleration then WPF is the right choice. Finally if your app needs to be both online and offline then WPF also would be a good choice.

In keeping with the series of demos for a professional services organization, Girish shows off an eye-popping jaw-dropping WPF app that radically improves the time sheet entry process. The scenario is an offline one. Dynamics CRM provides a great offline framework as part of both the end-user experience and the developer toolkit. By designating an entity in the system as available offline, the framework will automatically pull data from the CRM server and store it locally. In order to make the experience a natural one a local web server (Cassini) and database server (SQL Server Express) are used. In this demo we used the Microsoft Office Outlook client to take CRM offline. I even surprised Girish by yanking out the network cable. :)

The Dynamics Duo talk about CRM and Office Business Applications (OBA)

Ben Riga — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:11:00 GMT

In the last episode we talked about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server; in this one we talk about Microsoft Office on the client side.

CRM actually integrates really really well with Microsoft Office Outlook right out of the box. That’s a natural as it’s the place where many people work day-in day-out (and especially those sales and marketing folks). But what about those people that need that data in Word or Excel? In this episode we talk about how easy it is to customize the integration of Dynamics CRM with Microsoft Office on the client side. This category of applications, often referred to as Office Business Applications (OBA), help to unlock the value of line-of-business (LOB) systems, such as the ones built on the Dynamics CRM platform, and turn document-based processes into real applications. There’s lots more info about these types of apps over at OBA Central.

In the demo Girish put together, we see how the app is surfaced with a custom ribbon. This in turn opens a Status Report template which has a custom task pane. That task pane pulls all the relevant information for my status report from the CRM server (in our case CRM Online). It authenticates and then grabs the project info. When I choose a Project it also pulls in the work items for that project. Just like with the SharePoint example, it’s trivial to open a CRM form right from within Word where I review more detailed info or even start an Office Communicator session with the owner of the work item.

I can then insert the work items along with descriptions and hours worked directly into the status report. Since you’ll want to share that status report with your customer, Girish built in the ability to publish it to Office Live Small Business. Office Live is the ideal place for sharing documents with customers or partners who won’t have access to SharePoint sites behind your firewall (and it’s free!).

The secret sauce that allows these kinds of apps to be developed so quickly is right in Visual Studio in the form of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). As you might expect, the same authentication code we used in the SharePoint example is used for authentication from with the OBA. Then it’s just a case of using the Dynamics CRM web services to pull info from CRM and post it into the Word doc. Nice!

The Dynamics Duo talk about Dynamics CRM and SharePoint

Ben Riga — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:46:00 GMT

In this segment Girish and I talk about how Dynamics CRM integrates with SharePoint. We begin with a little guidance for where you might use one over the other and where they work well together. And they sure do go well together. “Separated at birth” is how I put it in the video. :) Girish’s demo shows a custom SharePoint page. Not many people know that SharePoint can be stylized using CSS to build sites that look nothing like plain vanilla SharePoint. This is a pretty good example of that.

We use a SharePoint List Web Part to pull data from CRM to show a list of CRM users and the hours from their time sheets. This was pulled directly from CRM using web services. We also show how could use that data to display a dashboard style gauge using Dundas Gauge for SharePoint. You can pull CRM data directly into SharePoint to build a dashboard. You can then pull that dashboard into the CRM web client (minus the SharePoint chrome). By pulling it into the web client it automatically shows up in the Outlook client. Speaking of Outlook; in the last segment we talked about customization but didn’t show the Outlook client so Girish gives us a quick tour of how that works also.

Each of the forms in CRM are URL-addressable. Girish puts that to good use in showing how you can pop a CRM form directly from within SharePoint. He also shows how CRM lights up automatically when you have Office Communicator installed leaving room for some interesting Unified Communication scenarios. We should probably do an episode on UC soon.

The segment wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t show some code. Girish built the list part using the Visual Studio Web Part project template. The code to pull in the time sheets into a list web part is about 10 lines of C#. The hardest part was doing the authentication. CRM provides a plug-able authentication mechanism and 3 different auth options out of the box. On-premise deployments will likely use Active Directory, while CRM Online uses Windows Live ID and finally if you’re deploying in a partner-hosted mode you’ll use form-based authentication. Girish shows how as an ISV you can build your application once and take all of those options into account. After that the code you write is portable across all the deployment options.

The Dynamics Duo talk about Dynamics CRM Customization

Ben Riga — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:18:00 GMT

Girish on my team has been working on a demo that demonstrates the capabilities of the Dynamics CRM platform. We figured it would be a lot more interesting to get some of that on video in the form of a conversation (as opposed to a screencast) so I get to play the role of interviewer and Girish is the "talent" :). In this episode, we started off thinking we'd talk about Dynamics CRM and SharePoint integration but got so deep into the underlying capabilities of CRM that we ran out of time. We'll show you the SharePoint stuff in the next episode. I promise!

The demo that Girish has been working on uses the scenario of a fictitious graphics design firm (i.e. a professional services organization). Clearly CRM works great for automating sales, service and marketing functions. What we think about is the stuff under the covers that can be used by developers and ISVs to build new applications that may or may not be related to CRM. That’s what we mean by the CRM platform.

This includes the basic metadata required to store the data related to a line-of-business application. CRM uses the concept of entities and attributes to store data whether your online or offline (all stored in SQL Server). It also makes the building of relationships among those pretty simple. Once you've got your metadata defined then building forms for the UI (ASP.NET) and workflow (Workflow Foundation) for process are next.

We’ll get into a lot more of the platform (and in particular the extensibility options) in the next few episodes.

Reporting and Analytics in Dynamics AX 2009

Ben Riga — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:14:00 GMT

I spent some time with Manoj Nuthakki on the Dynamics team chatting about how we take full advantage of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) in the recently released Dynamics AX 2009. AX 2009 ships with 10 SSAS cubes out of the box so includes tons of prebuilt KPIs and reports all built on the SQL Server BI platform.

Manoj walks us through how reports and charts are built in Visual Studio including conditional formating or custom business logic in C# while pulling metadata and data directly out of AX. The reports are easily put into the AX 2009 rich desktop client and the enterprise portal web client (built on SharePoint). With the role center integration a developer can build reports, charts and KPIs that appear only for the appropriate roles. Since AX is an international product, localization is built right in.

Partner Conference: CRM Mobility with CWR

Ben Riga — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:03:00 GMT

Another Dynamics CRM ISV that caught my attention at last week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference was CWR Mobility. Mobility is something I spend a lot of time thinking about and the Windows Mobile solution that CWR has put together is state-of-the-art when it comes to line-of-business apps on the go. What really got my attention was the inventive way they managed to embed it into the Dynamics CRM Online infrastructure. From an end-user perspective all you have to do is sign up for their service and they take care of all the hard work by reaching out across the cloud and installing and configuring the app. Nice!

Partner Conference: SalesCentric Silverlight CRM Relationships

Ben Riga — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:28:00 GMT

I spent most of last week in hot and humid Houston at the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. I did get to a few sessions but mostly I hung out with ISV partners in 1:1 meetings or in the exhibit area. There were tons of CRM ISVs showing interesting solutions.

One that caught my eye was SalesCentric. Their solution is a simple but important one. Many sales cycles are very complex and long, involving interactions with many people within an organization. SalesCentric takes the list of contacts in the CRM system and makes the the relationships among them easier to visualize and discover. I was most interested in how they had transformed their ActiveX product into a brand new Silverlight solution. I thought others might find this interesting as Silverlight starts to get some attention. I also get excited at the possibility of seeing this as a mechanism for bringing information from other systems such ERP systems for example or maybe even social networks for the ultimate selling tool.

Hal Howard, Mike Ehrenberg, Sukumar Rathnam chat about Dynamics AX 2009

Ben Riga — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:23:00 GMT

Last week the Dynamics AX team announced general availability of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009. While the team was basking in the glow of a job well done I grabbed a few folks for a chat. In this Channel 9 video I sit down with Hal Howard, Mike Ehrenberg and Sukumar Rathnam. Hal is the General Manager for Dynamics ERP (he runs the R&D for all ERP products at Microsoft). Mike is senior architect for the entire Dynamics team. He’s also a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. Sukumar is Architect for Dynamics AX.

In our short chat we talk about a lot of different topics. Of course, Dynamics AX is an ERP product and there are numerous new features for customers using the product (literally hundreds of new features actually). For this chat we focused completely on the ISV and SI developer experience. Dynamics AX 2009 takes a major step forward in integrating itself into the Microsoft stack. That includes deep integration of web services with Windows Communication Foundation, process workflow with Windows Workflow Foundation, storage, reporting and business intelligence with SQL Server, a brand new role-tailored user experience in either a rich client built entirely in .NET or a web client built entirely in SharePoint/ASP.NET, and finally tight integration of unified communication with Office Communication Server/Office Communicator. I definitely need to dive into some of these in more detail. Look for more Ch9 videos on these topics soon.

I think Sukumar said it best: “Grab Windows Server 2008; Go get SQL Server 2008; Get Visual Studio 2008, Add AX 2009 and go party with it. Go write some code.”