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I really wonder sometimes
of the intelligence of corporate types.
The Tom Thumb grocery store here in Coppell, Texas just underwent a slight renovation.
Among other things, they replaced the photo-mat with a Startbucks coffee bar.
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. The only issue is that if I walked out the front door ( the one on the right ), I could throw a rock through the front door of a real Starbucks.
Maybe the location scouts were on vacation that week…
Meanderings
(No Ratings Yet)1,000 views
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Setting the default view for a CRM 3.0 Entity
If you would like to globally change the default View for an entity within CRM, perform the following steps from the CRM Web Client logged on as someone who has at least the System Customizer role:
- Select Settings, Customization.
- Edit the Entity you wish to change.
- Select the Forms and Views page.
- Click once on the View you wish to make the Default.
- Click the More Actions button.
- Click Set Default.
- Click save and close
- Click Publish.
- Navigate back to a CRM area where that entity is visible.
- Click on the Entity to show its contents.
- Verify that the View: is what you just selected in step 4.
That's it.
Customization, Dynamics CRM (No Ratings Yet)3,071 views Loading ... -
Tools: Extracting the contents of an MSI file
Have you ever downloaded an MSI installer package and just wanted to see what was in it or just wanted a single file from inside? Normally, you'd have to install the MSI and do your poking around afterwards. No longer
Scott Willeke has written a utility called Less MSIérables that will allow you to view and extract files from an MSI file.
It is exteremely handy and worth adding to your toolbox.
Thanks Scott.
Misc (No Ratings Yet)1,340 views Loading ... -
The CRM Team Rocks! More sample code
Timing is everything and it turns out that a couple of the CRM Team have written articles that show two techniques that actually need to utilize on my current CRM gig..
Arash Ghanaie-Sichanie shows us how to call CRM web services from JavaScript:
Calling “CRM” Web services using JScript
and Michael Ott shows us how to execute a saved user query ( Advanced Find type ):
Running saved or user queries from an SDK application on CRM 3.0
Excellent work. Thanks guys.
Customization, Dynamics CRM (No Ratings Yet)1,797 views Loading ... -
More on CRM 3.0 Picklist Options
Update to the article I posted Saturday regarding a utility I released to edit CRM 3.0 Picklist options.
Kjell-Sverre Jerijærvi took me up on my request to create a solution in Excel to edit CRM Picklist options:
Using Excel to generate picklist XML for MSCRM
Excellent work Kjell!
Customization, Dynamics CRM (No Ratings Yet)1,818 views Loading ... -
Windows XP: Automated Backups to a USB Flash Drive
Last week, while setting up a backup solution for a customer, I learned something interesting about the Windows XP Job Scheduler:
It will not run a scheduled job if the user has a blank password.
Yeah, I know, you shouldn't have a blank password anyway, but some people just don't want to fool around with passwords on a 3-workstation peer-to-peer network.
So, you have three options:
1) Create an Administrator-level account with a password on the workstation and supply that user's credentials when saving the backup job.
2) Set a password for the normal user and supply that's user's credentials when saving the backup job.
3) Check the box labeled: Only run job if user is logged on ( or something like that ). Of course, if this box is checked, the user can't log off their workstation when they leave for the day, creating yet another security situation.
So, after all is said and done, option 1 would be your best choice to circumvent the situation.
Misc (No Ratings Yet)1,296 views Loading ... -
Converting a web site from FrontPage to ASP.NET
About a month ago, I had to create a new company and along with it, a new web site. Since I've used FrontPage for simple web sites for quite a period of time, that is usually my first choice.
My idea was to get the site up and running so that I have a presence, then migrate the site to ASP.NET so I can take advantage of some of the new features built into Visual Studio 2005.
Well, it turns out that I may need to perform that conversion soon, rather than later, so I started doing some research into requirements for performing the conversion.
I didn't find a whole lot of information about the process other than it's a web site and VS2005 can import an existing web site as a project. I did find at least one tool that was supposed to help you with the transition. I also saw quite a bit of conversation about ASP.NET and FrontPage Extensions getting into arguments, etc. Anyway, I thought it wouldn't hurt to try a conversion experiment to see what happened.
So, I created a working directory on my test server, republished the site to that folder, and opened it with VS2005.
One of the features I like about FrontPage is the ability to create "include" files that can be referenced from other pages. This is great for things like menus, logos, copyrights, etc. and it really cuts down on maintenance because you only have a single location to edit.
When VS2005 imported the FrontPage web site, it converted all of the includes to static text or images within each page. This is not a bad thing and it actually saved me some work.
In the current site design, the main page has one design and each subsequent page pretty much follows the same design, look and feel, etc. A perfect opportunity to utilize the Master Pages feature in VS2005.
I created a master page, copied the common content from one of the other pages, and put a "content placeholder" at the location where page-specific content would be placed.
I then created "content pages" for each of the pages in the site ( with the exception of the home page ). This operation was nothing more than creating a new ASPX web form page, associating it with a Master Page, and copying the content from the old HTML page.
I then created a new default.aspx page and copied the content from the old index.html page to the new default.
Finally, I patched up all of the links by searching for ".htm" and replacing it with ".aspx" and I was pretty much done.
Now I've played around with Master Pages a little in the past and I have almost zero content on my existing site; so taking those things into consideration, I have to tell you that it only took me about an hour to convert the whole site from FrontPage to ASP.NET.
What's Next?
So now the easy part is over. The reason I started this process was to enable additional security features and a create restricted sub-sites for customer and internal use.
Security won't be an issue because the new ASP.NET has a membership component built-in that will enable me to control access to the site based on a login ID.
In fact, the biggest challenge I face will be moving the solution from my development environment to GoDaddy, my hosting platform.
Development (No Ratings Yet)3,071 views Loading ... -
Development: New "Atlas" Videos Released
The Microsoft ASP.NET team has released a new series of videos that show you how to implement various parts of the Atlas framework.
For those of you who are ASP.NET developers and haven't heard of Atlas, it is Microsoft's framework for integrating AJAX into ASP.NET.
Check it out, if you have not already.
Development (No Ratings Yet)1,108 views Loading ... -
test
test
Meanderings (No Ratings Yet)1,057 views Loading ... -
Development: Comparing SQLDMO to SQL SMO
[ So have you ever wondered how many times Microsoft has to create new acronyms? I bet someone get's paid for every new one they create. :) ]
Anyway, back to the topic at hand:
Managing SQL Server Objects
As I have written about in several articles here on my blog, I have been using SQLDMO to retrieve information from SQL Server and perform various activities that ordinarily I would have to use SQL Enterprise Manager for.
Today, I wanted to discuss with you an alternative to SQLDMO called SQL SMO, which ships with SQL Server 2005.
Here is a quick overview of both DMO and SMO:
SQLDMO:
- Works with SQL Server versions 7, 2000, and 2005
- COM based component – not managed code
- Small footprint
- Will work with .NET 1.1 and 2.0
SQL SMO:
- Designed for SQL Server 2005 but most functionality will work with SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 7
- All managaged code
- Requires .NET 2.0
- Requires SMO to be installed
- Requires SQL Server 2005 Native Client
- Requires MSXML 6.0
Deciding Which to Use:
Looking at several of the examples on MSDN, it would seem that the SMO libraries are a bit cleaner than DMO and they allow you greater flexibility and functionality.
I think you need to take into account the following items when planning your application:
- What is my market? Is it SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005?
- Do my customers have SQL Server 2005 installed?
- If you are writing an add-on for another product, does that product require SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005?
- What is your development platform? Visual Studio 2003 or 2005?
- How will your application be distributed?
( Web, CD, manual installation by an engineer. )
My Decision:
But, after looking at all of the requirements, I decided to stick with using DMO until such a time as I encountered a feature of SMO that required me to switch to the new codebase. As it turns out, most of my customers are running SQL 2Server 000 and will not be switching to 2005 for the foreseeable future. So, I have a secondary reason for not making the switch.
Depending on your circumstances, you make take a similar route. Although I like the idea of having a totally managed code solution, the costs far outweigh the benefits. For me, requiring the user to download 50+MB of support software just to get my application to load, was more than I could stand.
In a couple of years, when the SQL Server 2005 market is more fully established, I am assuming I'll be making the switch and rewriting all of my DMO libraries to incorporate SMO features.
References:
SQL Server and DMO: Distributed Management Objects Enable Easy Task Automation
SQL Server Management Objects (SMO)
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