Thursday, May 15, 2008
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The great news for who is mainly a windows client developer (like the author of this blog 
) is that with the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 (actually in Beta 1 stage) will be released the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Client Profile, a subset of the .NET 3.5 library only for the client applications.
The new light "client .NET package" (about 26 Mb) will include these components:
- CLR
- WinForms
- ClickOnce
- WPF e WCF
and it will have a direct support inside Visual Studio 2008:
This helps to have a light installer when you deploy your applications.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
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In these days we're observing lots of curiosity and interesting around the Workflow capabilites in Sharepoint and during our demos I'm trying to show to my customers that you don't need to be an expert on Windows Workflow Foundation in order to create the biggest part of the workflows that your business needs.
If you decide to adopt the Sharepoint platform, you've a powerful and adaptable workflow platform and you've a tool that can really tune up your business: Sharepoint Designer.
Sharepoint Designer has an intuitive wizard that permits you to build, compile and install a workflow on a Sharepoint library in few minutes. With the standard activites exposed by Sharepoint Designer you can build really a big amount of different workflows and I love to show that, only with the standard features and a careful Sharepoint Site design, you can satisfy a big amount of your business needs.
But Sharepoint Designer is more than this... what many people doesn't know is that Sharepoint Designer is extendible: if you're a developer, you can create custom workflow activities with Visual Studio and Windows Workflow Foundation and make them available to use with Sharepoint Designer in a simple and intuitive manner to your end users.
The steps in order to make a workflow activity available to Sharepoint Designer are essentially these:
- Create the custom activity with Visual Studio
- Register the Workflow Activity dll in the GAC on the SharePoint server
- Register the Workflow Activity dll in the <authorizedTypes> section of the web.config on the SharePoint server (remember that if your site is running on a specific port (for example 111) the we.config to update is located on C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\111\web.config).
- Register the activity for use in SharePoint Designer via the WSS.ACTIONS file on the SharePoint server
You can find an interesting tutorial here.
With these extensions, Sharepoint Designer can become really an interesting workflow editor I think and, more important, available to users that are not developers or that doesn't have development knowledges.
If you're interested on custom activities for Sharepoint Designer, remember that on CodePlex there's an interesting project called Useful Sharepoint Designer Custom Workflow Activities with interesting ready to run objects. My favourite? The Start Another Workflow activity (a lack on Sharepoint Designer I think... 
):
If you work on the Healthcare field (this is a big part of our business) I think that your mind will do a great jump to the future when you'll see the just released Microsoft Health Common User Interface (MSCUI) Patient Journey Demonstrator,a great live sample on how you can implement cool UI for the Healthcare applications.
The interesting news is that demo scenario is a part of a project called Microsoft Health Common User Interface (CUI) that claims to build a common User Interface Design Guidance for the next generation Healthcare applications (actually are available the Design Guidance and the Developer Toolkit.
Absolutely a cool project to monitor...
Sunday, May 04, 2008
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On his new web diary, Silvano Coriani has published an interesting message: in a new software era where the user interface is growing as importance, why the old GRID is always so requested?
I agree that with the latest technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation the UI must be revisited and the we've to be ready for a new way to obtain informations from a software and to interact with data, but a new visual experience is not all for a software.
A software, expecially in the business world, must be productive! The grid could be an old concept (at least it's 20 years old) but I think that this is the most productive control I've ever used on a business software.
If you think to a software that is built in order to manage informations, having such a grid that can permits you to have all the informations you want under your eyes, filter them, order them and immediately work on the represented data, this is unvaluable for a user... Obviously, the grid concept must be improved and adapt to the new UI experience (and I think this is why the biggest request to the WPF Team is actually to have a new DataGrid despite WPF helps to do so with the ListView control for example), but thinking now to a control more productive that the "old" grid view, is a bit strange for me...
Thursday, May 01, 2008
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If you work with Sharepoint (in these days I'm working a lot with the workflow functionalities) one of the things that sometimes you've to do is to retrieve the GUID associated to a Sharepoint list. This is not so immediate and intuitive, but there are tricks that I want to share here.
The first way (thanks to Nick Grattan) is this:
- Navigate to the SharePoint list using the browser.
- Select the Settings + List Settings menu command.
- Copy the Url from the browser address bar into Notepad. It will look something like:
http://moss2007/ProjectX/_layouts/listedit.aspx?List=%7B26534EF9%2DAB3A%2D46E0%2DAE56%2DEFF168BE562F%7D
- Delete everying before and including “List=”.
- Change “%7B” to “{”
- Change all “%2D” to “-“
- Chnage “%7D” to “}”
You are now left with the Id:
{26534EF9-AB3A-46E0-AE56-EFF168BE562F}
The second way is a more quick way that doesn't require URL decoding:
Just go to the List or Library settings as described above, then right-click on the “Audience targeting settings” or “Information management policy settings” links, choose Copy Shortcut and then paste the URL. These links aren’t URL encoded and you've immediate access to the list GUID.
Friday, April 25, 2008
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I don't know if it's a bug on the upgrade procedure or what, but on two different systems I've experienced a problem on decimal and money fields after an upgrade from Microsoft CRM 3.0 to Microsoft CRM 4.0 (Italian language).
The problem appears curious: when you enter a value on a money or decimal field (for example 7) and you try to save the record, the number changes to 700.00 and it's multiply by 100 on every record save.
My first idea was to check the Organization Setting for the number format (and money format) but here the decimal separator was OK.
After different checks, I've discovered that the problem lies on the user settings table (UserSettingBase), where the decimal separator and thousand separators was wrong (both set to dot).
In order to correct the bug, you've to launch via SQL Server Management Studio this query:
UPDATE UserSettingsBase SET DecimalSymbol = ','
So strange...
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
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I remember when, 4 years ago, I leave my old company in Turin for joining EID... I was really happy for the chance and I had a clear target on my mind: put all my forces and ideas in order to help this company to grow.
Our team here is a mix of different competencies and capabilities and our customers are the testimonials of the quality of our services.
After the great results obtained with our network Navlab (Microsoft President's Club Member Award for the 2nd consecutive year and Gold Certified), today I'm pleased to announce that also EID has obtained the Microsoft Gold Certified award and has joined the Small Business Specialist club.
We're more happy today...
Saturday, April 05, 2008
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Today Microsoft has officially released the 1.1 version of Microsoft Dynamics Mobile on PartnerSource.
This new release will support:
- Microsoft Dynamics NAV 4.0 SP3
- Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 SP1
- Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 SP1
- Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 SP2
Directly from the Product Team's blog: "We are releasing in 2 packages, one for the Microsoft Dynamics Mobile - Mobile Development Tools, containing the Server and Framework Components and one for Microsoft Dynamics Mobile - Mobile Sales. You should note that the Server components and Mobile Sales integration objects are already included as part of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 5.0 SP1 so a separate installation of these objects is not necessary. Also, the documentation is packaged in one installer covering all products".
We've frequently developed solutions for interoperability between NAV and the mobile world, so having a standard framework directly from Microsoft is a great new chance for all the Dynamics partners.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
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Today I had a discussion about when to limit the number of attributes into Microsoft Dynamics CRM to gain with performances and I've observed that there's not always a clear idea on how SQL Server manages these things.
When you add a custom attribute on a CRM entity, Microsoft Dynamics CRM adds a new column on the corresponding table into the SQL Server database.
With SQL Server 2000, the maximum length of a table row was 8 KB. While this is still the physical maximum length of a page, SQL Server 2005 can move overflow varchar, nvarchar, varbinary, or sql_variant data to another page while maintaining a 24-byte pointer on the original data page, making it possible to store a row that contains more than 8 KB of data. To accommodate overflow in this way, each column in the row must have a maximum length of 8 KB. When the combined length of all the columns is greater than 8 KB, SQL Server will automatically move the largest column to an overflow page.
With the last Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 the row size limit is bypassed because it supports only SQL Server 2005. However, remember that in order to have better performances, you should stay below the 8KB limit.
This little notes is obviously valid not only for CRM 4.0 but also for Microsoft Dynamics NAV and for every database tables in general. Don't spread too much with attributes...
Due to the increasing number of trackbacks spamming (last month was terrible!), I've disabled the trackback feature on my blog.
Unfortunately seems that also Akismet is vulnerable... 
Maybe a day I'll use something different, for example a CAPTCHA like this:
Some weeks ago I was invited to leave feedbacks on a survey published by Microsoft about the next version of the Workflow Designer. One of the coolest feature about the actual WF Designer is that you can rehost it inside any custom application (for example a Winform application) and you can enable your end users to edit processes or simply to to visualize and monitor the workflow state.
For my little experience I've done in these months on trying to rehost the WF Designer, I can say that it's not so easy as someone could imagine. However, despite the difficulties on doing this, the actual WF Designer is not always so "friendly" for the end user. I want to leave you here the ideas I had on my personal WF Designer Rehosting case because I think that they're common to many of you.
Basically, I'd like to have a custom application where to rehost the WF Designer in order to:
- Give the power to the end user to graphically monitor the WF state and flow (by viewing the WF diagram on the application).
- Give the power to the end user to have a set of custom activities that he can use to create his simple workflows via the application interface.
- Give the power to the end user to modify the actual running workflows simply via the application UI.
Obviously, I'd like that the end user that works with my application could be a person that doesn't know the WF platform, but that it can work with his workflows in a simple and intuitive way without advanced programming knowledges.
Is it possible to have something like that in the next WF Designer? I think it could be marvellous if Microsoft will provide something that permits us to give this power and this simplicity to the end users.
If this could be possible, I think that the WF platform will increase his power a lot... from a platform for the developers it could be adapted to be a framework directly for the end user.
Why not having a sample of this in the near future? Maybe a Winform or WPF application (or better, both ).
We'll see what happens...
Saturday, March 15, 2008
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I love when Microsoft releases samples of complete applications that works with the latest technologies: they are really an important way to understand the architectural concepts and an unvaluable guide for developers.
The latest release is the Windows Mobile Line of Business Solution Accelerator, a Smart Client built using .NET and SQL Server Compact edition that shows an interesting use of .NET Compact Framework, LINQ, Dynamic SQL, Web Services, WCF, Sync Framework.
Absolutely to check...
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
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On the last VSTO Power Tools package there's an interesting SharePoint Workflow Package Generator, a simple tool that creates a WSP file from a VS 2008 SharePoint workflow project.
As described by Nikhil Kothari's announce:
The package generator uses the feature.xml file to generate a WSP file. In the WSP file, it will also include any <ElementFile> that have been referenced. Hence, any referenced InfoPath forms and resource files will also be packaged in the WSP file.
To use the package generator just type:
“c:\Program Files\Microsoft VSTO Power Tools 1.0\workflowpackagegen.exe" /featureManifest:feature.xml "
An example of incorporating the tool into the project as an MSBuild post-build task is shown below. You can add this to the end of your csproj/vbproj file to get a wsp file after every build:
<Target Name="AfterBuild">
<Exec Command=""c:\Program Files\Microsoft VSTO Power Tools 1.0\workflowpackagegen.exe" /featureManifest:feature.xml" ContinueOnError="true">
</Exec>
</Target>
Really interesting in order to simplify the workflow deployment on Sharepoint...
Saturday, February 23, 2008
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During our event some days ago in Busto Arsizio, I've received an interesting question from a customer: "Can I plan to use Sharepoint as a document management system and move all my File Shares into the MOSS platform?".
Answering to this question is not so simple because I think that many aspects must be taken into consideration.
The first aspect that I always try to put in evidence when I talk about this topic is that File Shares are a technology that has the scope of storing data, while SharePoint is all about connecting people to information. Sharepoint is actually a great document management system with lots of "plus" such as Document Versioning, Office integration, Recycle Bin, Web Access, Metadata and (my top feature) Workflows.
All these feature together makes Sharepoint a complete enterprise platform that can't be reduced to be only a document management platform. SharePoint must not be viewed as a replacement for file shares, but instead it must be viewed as a platform that makes data accessible and useful no matter where it’s stored.
Why this?
Because in a Sharepoint environment you can directly store documents inside a document library, but you can also use the Business Data Catalog and use Sharepoint as an interface to access your File Shares.
You've to remember that Sharepoint stores document internally on SQL Server by using BLOB fields (limits of 2Gb of data for a single document). SharePoint lists work well with files under 50MB and can be used up to 2GB, with configuration.
Sharepoint is not a competitor or a replacement for File Servers, but instead it can give you a new way of work with your files, based on a complete collabouration and on productivity improvements.
However, there's an interesting post here where you can obtain more informations on this topic.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
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Today we'll have the second step of our "Dynamics TempoZero Tour" and the site is Busto Arsizio (VA).
We'll show a nice demo of integration between Dynamics NAV, MOSS and Business Intelligence (a complete real world scenario of a manufacturing company) and we'll talk more in depth about the technology under the cover (BDC, Windows Workflow, Web Services, the future NAV Service Layer etc.).
We've also added a section for Dynamics CRM 4.0.
I hope to see some of you this morning...
Here's a screenshot of our demo scenario: NAV data published on a MOSS Dashboard.
