Random writings, thoughts, tools, and ideas....

I am really proud to say I know Zlatan, the SharePoint MVP, S.A. Architect community lead and occasional CRM “expert” ;) because he does lead and share information with the community. So it is really great to see him listed at 59th on the top 100 SharePoint blogs (a climb of 41 places from May!). You can read more on his post. Weldone Zlatan!

Willy has another survey on the go which is worth the 3 seconds it takes to complete it, so for the sake of better documentation please complete it (click the image to access it):

Thanks to Willy for the heads up.

Seriously I am grinning like mad this morning, because my first development love has returned: DELPHI! Many years ago it stopped being a good choice for work, if you could get any work, but that changed recently with the announcement of Delphi Prism. DP makes use of Visual Studio to host the Delphi language, that’s right all the power and beauty of VS! The language has been enhanced to support all the cool things that C# can do (LINQ, Silverlight)! So that is very cool, and using Oxygene Compiler you can target .NET, Win32, Mono (so you can run on Linux) with full GUI support for GTK#, and Cocoa for OSX (Tiger and Leopard)!

That’s right one fully featured language targeting 4 different platforms (Old Windows (Win32); New Windows (.NET); Linux; Mac OSX) right from within Visual Studio!

In reality though it has just been press announcements and demo’s at PDC so nothing for me to truly base this on… but hopefully soon.

InfoQ has a nice into article on the subject too: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/Delphi-Prism

After 10 months and 20 days (since RTM) it is now out! You can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=57c6267b-3b13-49dd-bfed-3cc83633aea7&displaylang=en&tm

Highlights of the release include (full list at 952858):

• 117 Fixes included!
• As usual with a rollup pack – importing and exporting customisations between different versions is not supported.
• Workflows which are stuck in In Progress or Waiting (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957701/) – fixed. I am hoping this refers to my previous posts on the issue.
• Also fixed is workflow not working when imported: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950680/ which may be related.
• When using the router it downloads the message over and over again (saw this one in the field): http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952018
• Outlook fixes for not responding or data loss!
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955234/
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954800/
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948121/
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948045/
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951179/
• The text length issue I posted on previously: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955247/

Important Note - Two of the hotfixes require MANUAL configuration after the rollup has been installed. They are (click links for details):

• You cannot use Outlook as expected until all Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 add-ins are loaded
• E-mail messages from a CRM user to a queue are not delivered in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Thanks to Jim Glass for the heads up.

There are three sources for information which I have found valuable for VS2010:

• First is the video from PDC about a lap around VS2010: Great high level introduction to what it will be.
• Next is Willy’s series on VSTS 2010 which he just finished.
• Last is for the SharePoint people, is the InfoQ article on it: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/11/wss_vs2010 – which had some serious highlights:
• "These tools will replace the much-derided SharePoint Designer”
• “Visual Studio will be able to building and debug SharePoint projects. "F5 Just Works!"”
• “A new Packaging Explorer will exist that supports editing Packaging and structuring the SharePoint Features and WSP file.”

Unfortunately the VS2010 bits we have available currently (if you want a copy let me know) includes everything from the video and Willy’s posts but does not include the WSS items. In fact the forthcoming CTP will not even include them :(

Herman, who you may know as “The man without a blog” or “The Delegator” or the guy who works over the partition from me, has released a poster detailing UI interface choices there are and what are the factors involved with choosing that. Very good to have if you trying to decide between Silverlight, Flash, Flex, ASP.NET, WinForms, WPF etc…

Download details available on Willy’s blog.

A picture of the poster… it’s much bigger when you download it.

Update 10 Jan 2011 - The link to Willy-Peter's blog no longer works.

I haven’t worked with MSCRM for a few months, but I still follow the news and today there was something worth acknowledging. Jim Daly released a tool which creates a Word 2007 Document detailing the configuration of all customisable Microsoft CRM 4.0 forms, including tabs, sections and details about each field. This document can be used for planning of form customisations or documenting the current state of form customisations. Ah how I wish I had this for some projects!

You can download it for free MSDN Code Gallery!

Thanks Jim Glass for heads-up.

What the documentation looks like for an appointment form.

If you are using IE 8 beta 2 and your zoom is NOT at 100% you could be having all kinds of issues from performance to skipping around the screen and being unable to select text. This doesn’t seem to be a big issue, I mean who runs at anything other than 100% but it is bigger than that. See in IE 8 your DPI settings will effect the zoom, so if you are running 1280x1024 or higher by default you will be at 120DPI and not the standard 96DPI which means you will run at 125% zoom in IE! It also effect people using the zoom for accessibility reasons.

There are two items available for voting on for these issues on Connect, so if you are an IE 8 beta user please take the 5 min to first test yourself and if you are able to repro the issue please vote on these items:

• https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=371251
• https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=382566

Ah, day 2 has arrived so I got up at 6 to get ready and watch the email trickle down (Emerald Casino appears to only have GPRS for Vodacom) which didn’t finish in the end. Unfortunately this post will not be as informative as the previous two, because what I was doing was taking notes on the machine I was working on and about an hour before the end of the day there was a power failure and I was not able to retrieve my notes :( So not only did we leave early, it was meant to be a short day to begin with… nice for a Friday to avoid traffic and get home early.

What stood out for me for that day was working with PerformancePoint which is a business user tool to build dashboards, KPI’s and scorecards. It was impressive at how easy it was to work with it, especially considering that in the background it’s creating cubes, writing MDX etc… This is the way this is meant to be. However it is a BUSINESS USER tool, so much so that Kevin (the presenter from IS Partners) was telling how they hired four CA’s in the last month and trained them to use PerformancePoint rather than training “BI people” to understand business. From speaking to some of the Microsoft people who have used it, the installation of PerformancePoint though is exceptionally tough and I was disappointed that it was not even touched on :(

Anyway without notes it’s hard to write long posts without possibly making huge mistakes, so I will leave it there for what was covered.

As an event it delivered on the initial point of being a level 200 course and helping understand the concepts and helping business users. The problems with labs and manual are understandable (these things happen) but considering you are paying for this and this is a MICROSOFT event it definitely should’ve been more professional than it felt. I would recommend this course to analysts and business users but not to development or serious BI users.

If you haven’t checked out GMail for a while, you need to today! They have launched approx 12 themes for it. That in itself isn’t impressive but the fact the themes seem MUCH faster than before and work perfectly in IE 8 Beta 2 in standards mode means that is one less site that I have to keep IE in compat mode for!

My inbox with the new Shiny theme – after Firefly anything names Shiny gets bonus points with me.