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MVP Summit 2010
This week finds me back in Bellevue, Washington for the 2010 MVP Summit.
It’s always great to met up with my fellow MVPs, both CRM and others, and listen to what Microsoft has to say this year.
Misc
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Happy Anniversary to Me
It is really hard to believe, but 26 years ago today, I started my career as a IT professional. I was attending DeVry University at the time and found a job just down the street at a small company that provided IT services for local businesses.
Here is the conversation between me and Brook, their other technical guy:
Brook: I need you to replace a floppy drive in an Eagle.
Me: Cool. What’s an Eagle?
This is an Eagle:
Yep. Then genuine article. It ran an operating system called CP/M and had two double-sided, double-density floppy drives.
A step up from there was this monster:
This was a network server, again running CP/M and servicing semi-intelligent terminals. The top box is the server, the bottom, unless I’m mistaken, is the tape backup unit. The server had a 10 Megabyte hard drive. The terminal on the left is just a dumb terminal used for server maintenance.
Things have changed quite a bit since 1984 and the change has not always been for the good. But, I can honestly say, it’s never been boring.
Peace out.
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Status message of the day
I was going to browse around WordPress.org today looking for some new plugins for my blogs when I got this message:
This is a custom message for a 503 error which I think is rather funny.
I did as instructed and the site was indeed back up and running a minute later.
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Please excuse my absence
Hi Everyone,
I wanted to apologize for the disappearance of my blog recently. Actually, my blog was still there, it was my domain that had disappeared. ( It’s a long story and something that was totally my fault. )
Anyway, that’s all taken care of so we should not have any service interruptions for quite some time.
Mitch
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Blast from the Past: Cool Programmer Books
The other day, I was reading Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success
by James Marcus Bach. It is an interesting book and one that I’ll write more about it in other post.
Anyway, James discussed a book, 6502 Assembly Language Programming, that his father gave him so he could write low-level programs for his Apple II. ( Yep, this was a while ago. ) James also explained what this book meant to him and how it changed his life.
Here is that book for me:
Circa 1985. This was the one that started it all. I absolutely devoured the contents of this book to the point that it basically fell apart. It told me everything that I needed to know about how a PC worked on the inside. That was a really big deal back then and I used that book for years doing everything from assembly language, to BASIC, to Turbo Pascal, to WordPerfect macros.
I sold most of my early computer programming books back in the mid-90’s so I no longer have much from my early programming days. But, while reading James’ book I remembered just how fun that book was and how it made me feel, and I got all nostalgic. I tracked one down on Amazon.com and for a mere $8 plus shipping, it again resides in my library.
Yee ha!
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Trouble Ticket of the Day
From a user at one of my customers:
CRM not cooperating.
Hmm, not exactly sure how to respond to that.
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Off Topic: Now this is funny
I decided to take another look at twitter today and add some people and companies that have started tweeting. Here is what I found when I logged in:
Hmm. Very strange, do you think that maybe one of the 8 tweets ( note red box ) that I sent back in March was “bad?”
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Working with Currencies, Revisited
In a previous article, I reviewed an error I was receiving when performing some JavaScript calculations on a CRM form. I ran into the same error message this week, but under different circumstances.
The user was receiving the following error message when opening a record of a custom entity we created:
Hmm, I thought to myself, I’ve seen this before.
It turns out that I was creating this record via a plug-in and had forgotten to include the transactioncurrencyid in the record.
Remember: You must always include the transactioncurrencyid attribute on any record you create if there is a money attribute contained anywhere within the entity.
How do you know you have a problem with the record? Instead of your money fields looking like this:
They look like this:
Notice the lack of a currency symbol to the left of the edit box?
The only way to correct such a record is to add the transactioncurrencyid attribute to the form and change the value on the form, and either use JavaScript to add the currency or have the user set it manually.
Again, the above statement applies to records that have been created programmatically. Records created manually should have the transactioncurrencyid populated automatically.
So, to keep from having issues, just add the transactioncurrencyid attribute to your list of attributes that are created.
Here is a method in C# that will pull back the information for the US Dollar:
public static transactioncurrency GetCurrency(ICrmService crmService) { // Build a query for US Dollar currency. QueryByAttribute dollarQuery = new QueryByAttribute(); dollarQuery.EntityName = EntityName.transactioncurrency.ToString(); dollarQuery.Attributes = new string[] { "currencyname" }; dollarQuery.Values = new string[] { "US Dollar" }; dollarQuery.ColumnSet = new AllColumns(); // Create the US currency request. RetrieveMultipleRequest dollarRequest = new RetrieveMultipleRequest(); dollarRequest.Query = dollarQuery; RetrieveMultipleResponse dollarResponse = (RetrieveMultipleResponse)crmService.Execute(dollarRequest); return (transactioncurrency)dollarResponse.BusinessEntityCollection.BusinessEntities[0]; }
which is used like this:
transactioncurrency usCurrency = GetCurrency(crmService); myEntity["transactioncurrencyid"] = new Lookup(EntityName.transactioncurrency.ToString(), usCurrency.transactioncurrencyid.Value);
The above assumes you’re working with Dynamic Entities inside the CRM plug-in framework.
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test2
Misc
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New Poll Added: Do you think on-line video training is worthwhile?
I am curious what you think about on-line video training. What I am describing is viewing a “screen cast” of a procedure, step, or process as a user is performing it.
I am curious if you find that more valuable than standard documentation.
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