Connecting to CRM 2011 using connectionStrings

One of the nice features we have in the Advanced Developer Extensions for CRM4 (since sdk v4.0.12) was the ability to define the connection details inside the connectionStrings section in the web.config file. However, this facility was missing in the early versions of the CRM2011 SDK. However, the latest update of the CRM SDK (March) has finally included this feature.  In fact, this is one of many extended set of features known as Developer Extensions (note the missing "Advanced" word from CRM4).

For instance, suppose you need to connect to a CRM 2011 server using Integrated security from a custom web project. First you have to define the CRM connection details inside the web.config (or app.config for other project types) as follows;

FastClaim now available on WP7 marketplace!

After a tense development phase and even more aggressive internal QA phase last week we submitted the mobile client of our FastClaim solution to the marketplace.  Yesterday it's status was showing as "Ready for Signing" on the AppHub portal and much to our delight today it is available on marketplace!

FastClaim is a solution to make the expense claim process faster and hassle free for the end users. We are going to take care of your organization's expense claim processing by integrating our FastClaim service with your organizations existing IT infrastructure which might be based on  Dynamics CRM, SharePoint or any other custom solution. If you like to see a small demo of the app, please check the video bellow.



If you already own a WP7 device and would like to try it out, you may download it by using Zune.

If you have any comments or suggestions please drop me a message or contact us using FastClaim Web site.

CRM 2011 - Populating a required Guid field using JScript

The Problem
Recently I had to use a Guid as a required field of a custom entity (it’s a tracking id). Initially the records were created using an external web service, so I had no issues on populating this field. i.e. when creating a new record, I simply use Guid.NewGuid() C# method to generate a new Guid. However, later there was a new requirement that the users should be able to create new records using the CRM web interface. At that time we had a small issue as the users had to enter a Guid in order to successfully create a record on CRM.

Well there are few tools out there to generate Guids, but for regular users it's not going to be the happiest thing in the world to generate a Guid and enter that on the CRM web form!

ASP.Net Dynamic Data: Implementing Data-driven websites made easy…

ASP.Net Dynamic Data is a great technology which was introduced in the first service pack (SP1) of the Dot.Net 3.5 Framework. In a nut shell, it is a collection of user controls and templates for quickly implementing a web site to interact with a data source. You may implement full CRUD (Create, Read, Update & Delete) functionality with just couple of lines.

Visual Studio 2010 comes with two flavors of templates to create Dynamic Data based web sites or web applications; Entity Model based or a Linq to SQL mapping based. However, ASP .Net Dynamic Data has far more applications than those. Instead of implanting a fully-fledged Dynamic Data web site, you may easily introduce Dynamic Data features to any other website.

                       

Visual Studio 2010 Dynamic Data Project Templates                       Data Field Project Item