Wintersport

It's been a while since my last posting. Well, for that I do have a good reason. I've been in France, Alpe d'Huez, for a week for winter holidays. Until the day before my holidays I didn't know for sure if I could go on holidays because of a high priority CRM project. Luckily for me the project has been delayed and so I have been snowboarding a week long!

I've been back for several days now but I'm still walking around with pain in my muscles. Not too weird though if you know that every day me and my friends started with a black piste for warmup and furthermore spending the day off-piste and in the funpark ;-)

Here's a picture of me with one of the jumps last week.

Are there more snowboarders who work with CRM? Or should I put it the way around: Are there more people who work with CRM and do a bit of snowboarding in their spare time? ;)

How to rename area's

Quite often I see the question "how do I rename an area in CRM v3.0?".

I could write an own example, but Arne Janning already did so in the public community. Here's his post:

In the CRM-web-client click --> Settings --> Customization --> Export Customizations --> mark Site Map --> More Actions --> Export Selected Customizations --> Hit OK on the dumb dialog.

You get a customizations.xml-file to download. In that file you'll find five area-elements: Workplace, SFA, MA, CS, Settings. These areas define the top-level structure of the "Wunderbar" (the Outlook-style navigation).

This is an example for an area-element:
<area id="SFA" shape="RECT" coords="0,0,0,0" resourceid="Area_Sales" icon="/_imgs/sales_24x24.gif" descriptionresourceid="Sales_Description">
To customize this you could add the "Title"-attribute to overwrite the ResourceId:

<area id="SFA" title="Clients" shape="RECT" coords="0,0,0,0" resourceid="Area_Sales" icon="/_imgs/sales_24x24.gif" descriptionresourceid="Sales_Description">The strucure of the sitemap is well documented in the SDK, which BTW has been updated and improved lately :o)

Microsoft CRM 3.0 SDK

Client Programming Guide --> Navigation Configuration: SiteMap

Once you have finished your customizations in the sitemap you can upload the again:

Settings --> Customization --> Import Customizations --> select your file --> upload, publish and hit F5 to reload the Wunderbar.

Hope that helps.

Getting inside MS CRM

If you think that solutions which are on this blog are unsupported, then take a look at the post which my new German colleague Arne Janning has posted:

Getting inside Microsoft CRM - Part I

He'll get you virtually inside crm and from there you will be able to do anything that you have ever wanted to do with MS CRM.

I'll have to warn you: if you don't feel comfortable with what you see, then just don't try this. You'll likely be messing up your (clients?) system :-)

MBS turns profitable

The Microsoft Business Solutions (Dynamics) group has made profit for the first time. The group posted an operating profit of $10 million vs. a loss of $17 million for the same quarter in the prior year.

Read the full Techweb article here.

MS CRM 3.0 trial download

You can now download MS CRM 3.0 for a 90 day trial in each language in which Microsoft CRM is available! The page will be updated with new languages as they are released.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7d418781-69ad-422d-92fa-87fdb2538e2c&DisplayLang=en

Thanks to John for the information :)

Hide a form field

Now that each field offers an OnChange event, we want to use it. At least I do. Based on the selection or values in another field, I'm disabling fields all over the screen. But why disabling and not hide them?! It's not documented and therefore not supported, but it sometimes is needed. The code to hide a field is:

crmForm.all.name_c.style.visibility = 'hidden';
crmForm.all.name_d.style.visibility = 'hidden';

Ofcourse modify the name_c and name_d to the correct fieldname_c and fieldname_d.

Happy hiding!

Update: Thanks to Robert Amos for an even better way to hide the fields.

Add dates programmatically to CRM

Does that word actually exist in English? Programmatically?

Anyway. When you're working on a program which uses the SDK to add or modify data in CRM, then you will find out that there is not much documentation about how to use this data. And when you enter wrong data to CRM, then the error message doesn't help you much either: 0x80040216 An unexpected error occurred.

Well. Here are 2 code examples which should get you started. Make sure that you do not pass in time data if it is a date only field.
Example 1 (Add data including time):

contact contact = new contact();
contact.new_dateandtime = new CrmDateTime();
contact.new_dateandtime.Value = "5/27/2005T12:00:00";
crmService.Create(contact);

Example 2 (Add data excluding time):

contact contact = new contact();
contact.new_dateandtime = new CrmDateTime();
contact.new_dateandtime.Value = "5/27/2005";
crmService.Create(contact);