Vista Ultimate

January 2, 2009 by akezyt.

Happy  new year. After couple months of transportation from Redmond(long story), I got my quad core machine back. However, it was such a long time that Windows Server 2008 installed on the machine has expire its evaluation period. Since I’m home today during new year vacation, I decide to rebuild the machine (what a geek). I could have installed Vista Home Basic that came with the machine but I decided to switch to Vista Ultimate to use all 4GB of memory. And more important, I already bought Vista Ultimate from company store, so why not :).

The packaging of Vista is quite interesting and not many people have seen it so I would like to share with everyone.

 

Glossy plastic box

Pull tab on the right

Pull tab at the top

Inner box slides out nicely

 

Fully slides out  

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D40x Unwrapped

September 23, 2007 by akezyt.

It arrived since Sep 14 but just have a chance to write about it. Luckily Tukta took picture while I unboxed it.

FedEx delivered it last Friday (Sep  14). It took a week to deliver from NJ to Seattle.

Tada.

The box is not sealed :). I called Nikon and they said that BuyDig.com is not authorized dealer so they don’t know their policy.

D40x body. It feels good.

Standard issue Nikkor 18-55. Our first lenses.

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CRM V3.0 Service Scheduling Performance and Scalability White Paper

September 22, 2007 by akezyt.

Our Business System Architecture (BSA) published Service Scheduling: Optimizations and Considerations white paper. It presented prescriptive guidance about what can customers/ISVs do to improve performance and scalability of Service Scheduling in CRM V3.0. It is based on their test and performance tuning on large deployment. It can be downloaded at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=4E077F9F-A712-4CDC-BDEF-FB9969E46F2B&displaylang=en.

Service scheduling was my first team in CRM when I joined 3 years ago so I always have a special place for it. I should write more about it in the future.

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Olympic National Park trip 2

September 6, 2007 by akezyt.

This labor day Tukta and I went to Olympic National Park. It was a wonderful trip. The weather is not perfect but we had a good time. All pictures are post here.

Day 1

From Bellevue, we drove to Edmunds ferry terminal and took a 30 minute ferry ride.

Our car (black Honda Civic) also took Ferry with us.

We got off at Kingston ferry terminal. Then we drove from Kingston to Port Angeles. On the way there, we stop at Port Gamble and visit a nice little car show. We saw a lot of antique automobiles.

1 1/2 hour after that we arrived at Port Angeles. As always, we got some brochure about toursit attractions.

Then we drove up Hurrican Ridge. It is very windy. Notice that Tukta changed her sweater as it is very cold. It was 5142 ft above sea level.

It was a cloudy day so we didn’t see mount Olympus.

On the way down the sky cleared up.

We even spot some dears (or elks) on road side.

Next we went to Dungenesse wild life refuge. It was nice place but you can see wild life only if you have binocular.

Some wild lifes.

This is our little hotel. It is Port Angeles downtown hotel. It is a family owned hotel but is very nice and clean.

Port Angeles is a small city. You need to waive a flag in order to cross the street (instead of pushing button at the traffic light).

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Olympic National Park trip

September 1, 2007 by akezyt.

We are planning for our labor trip. This year (actually, our first year together), we will go to  Olympic National Park. It is on Olympic Pennynsula. It will be couple hours drive and ferry ride.

Since we don’t have our new Nikon D40x yet, our pics will be from our good  old Canon A80.

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CRM Queue Gadget

August 15, 2007 by akezyt.

Last week I posted another article on MSDN. Code sample is available at GotDotNet. Last time I checked it got around 650 download so far.

Introduction

Microsoft CRM 3.0 shipped with an extensive web service API that can be used by various types of applications. Here is a sample Windows sidebar gadget (or just gadget) that retrieves queue items related to the currently logged in user every predefined interval. Since the gadget is always available on the desktop but small in size, the ideal information to display on gadget should be something dynamic and concise. In Microsoft CRM context, the queue item entity fits squarely as it is changed quite frequently and requires immediate attention from a user.

The code is provided at http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/UserSamples/Details.aspx?SampleGuid=A6791FE6-5A4C-4432-8FBD-BBD8A499120B

Figure 1 “In progress” queue items

Figure 2 “Assigned” queue items

Figure 3 Settings window

Developing CRM Gadget

For more information about developing gadget in general, please refer to MSDN article in the resource section. This article will focus more on CRM specific aspects.

Retrieving data from CRM

Gadgets are composed of HTML and Jscript. We can use XmlHttp from JScript to send hand crafted SOAP message to the CRM server. Then we use an Msxml2.DOMDocument to parse the response to get the result. We need not do it asynchronously as the user is not blocked by the gadget anyway and it will be much more complicated to do it asynchronously.

In keeping with best practices, this sample retrieves only columns that are needed to reduce server load.

Reading and writing settings through the gadget infrastructure

The gadget infrastructure provides a nice API for reading and writing settings. Be careful about storing sensitive information though. In this case, we just store the CRM server name, polling interval, and queue type so we are okay.

For reading settings

var currentServerName = System.Gadget.Settings.readString(”crmServerName”);

For writing settings

var temp = serverName.value;

System.Gadget.Settings.writeString(”crmServerName”, temp);

Securing gadget

Gadgets also subject to all sorts of cross site scripting vulnerabilities, since they are also web applications. All user input should be validated before using it. All external data (including data from the CRM server) must be properly encoded before rendering.

Using standard style sheet

This sample utilizes template.css to make the gadget look consistent with the CRM web application. For example the server name label is shown as a required field. This template.css file is shipped with CRM SDK. You can download it from Microsoft.com.

Deploying gadget

Because this gadget is a real application though it looks cute; there will be a time that you will want to patch it after you ship. The best way to enable gadget patching is to deploy it with MSI. However, for simplicity of our sample, I just use the zip approach. All you need to do is zip all HTML, JScripts, CSS, and the manifest (gadget.xml) together and change the resulting file’s extension from .zip to .gadget. Then the user can install it by double clicking.

Resources

- MSDN Windows Sidebar Gadget Development Overview (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa965850.aspx)

- System.Gadget.Settings in MSDN (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms723661.aspx)

- Other CRM Windows sidebar gadgets

• http://www.codeproject.com/gadgets/DynamicsCRMGadget.asp
• http://blogs.msdn.com/joris_kalz/pages/Vista-Microsoft-CRM-Search-Gadget.aspx

- CRM SDK (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9C178B68-3A06-4898-BC83-BD14B74308C5&displaylang=en).

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Another View of CRM Data

February 24, 2007 by akezyt.

Cross posted from MSDN blog. I wrote this article last week and it was published this week.

Another View of CRM Data

[Code examples are on the CRM Sandbox in the downloads section.] MS Dynamics CRM shipped with grid view and form view for displaying data such as account or contact information. However, that does not mean it is the only way to present CRM data. This article will show a way to represent CRM accounts on a map.

Populating account’s coordinate. Before we can show the account on the map, we first need to populate account’s location into CRM. Most account/contact already contains shipping or billing address. However, they are not in the format that is easy to map or locate. Out of the box, account already contains ‘latitude’ and ‘longitude’ attributes that we can use but they are not automatically populated by CRM. So we need to convert the human readable street address into latitude and longitude coordinate. This process is called geocoding. For existing CRM deployment where accounts and contacts are created without latitude and longitude, we need to mass-populate them using web service information in the CRM SDK. The are several providers that offer geocoding service such as:

• MapPoint
• Yahoo Map

In this example, we use the MapPoint web service. It is free of charge but you need to register for developer account before you can use it. There are some restrictions on developer account so double check before using it on commercial system. For new account that will be created after this initial mass-populating, we could incrementally populate latitude/longitude for them using JavaScript on form’s OnSave event or using server side callout. Sometimes, it might be easier to geocode each account’s address on the fly and plot them on the map every time. However, doing so would cause serious performance and unnecessary load time. Moreover, after getting location data into CRM, we can do something interesting such as optimizing delivery/service truck route based on sales order’s account/contact address. Displaying Account on the Map In this sample, we will just show each account on map using Virtual Earth map control (http://dev.live.com/virtualearth/sdk). It is quite easy to use after we get account’s latitude and longitude. Another interesting part is how do we query actual accounts from saved query. The steps are like this:

- Retrieve the actual fetch XML on savedquery entity. - Convert that fetch XML into QueryExpression object using FetchXmlToQueryExpressionRequest. - Use the QueryExpression to retrieve list of accounts.

For better performance, we can also cache the QueryExpression so we don’t have to look it up every time and save 2 web service calls but we are not doing it for simplicity. JavaScript then use XmlHttpRequest to send request XML to our QueryService and gets back XML. I manually created request XML and parsed response XML. However, you can use ASP.Net AJAX to create JavaScript proxy and save some more time. Showing account in map view is just one of another way to use CRM data. We hope to publish some more examples in the near future. But for now, we trust this example will provide some interesting concepts and ideas to consider for your implementation of CRM.

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IBM จัด Town hall meeting ใน Second Life

December 26, 2006 by akezyt.

อ่านเจอใน Business Week ว่า IBM จัด Town hall meeting ใน Second life. Sam Palminsano เองก็ปรากฏตัว(Avatar ที่ใส่สูทดำ แว่นหนาเหมือน Sam) ต่อหน้าพนักงาน 8000 คน(Avatar อีกเหมือนกัน)ที่หน้าพระราชวังต้องห้ามที่สร้างขึ้นใหม่ใน Second life โดยทีมวิศวกรของ IBM เอง.

ในช่วงปีที่ผ่านมามีบริษัทหลายแห่ง เข้าไปสร้าง Presence ใน Second life ไม่ว่าจะเป็น Gap ไปเปิดร้านขายเสื้อผ้าให้เหล่า Avatar. IBM เองก็ประกาศตั้ง Division ใหม่เพื่อทำ Technologies เกี่ยวกับ Virtual world ไปก่อน Town hall meeting นี้เอง.

มีเรื่องน่าสนใจเกี่ยวกับ Second life และ Virtual world ที่อยากเขียนอีกเยอะ ไวจะ้มาเขียนครั้งต่อไป.

ที่มา: Business Week

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ไฟดับมาราธอน

December 22, 2006 by akezyt.

เมื่อวันศุกร์ที่แล้วมีพายุเข้าที่ Seattle ความเร็วประมาณซัก 100 MPH ได้. ปรากณว่าไฟดับไปล้านกว่าครัวเรือนได้. Apartment เราใน Bellevue ก็โดนเข้าไปเหมือนกัน. ที่แย่มากคือดับไปตั้งแต่เช้าวันศุกร์ที่แล้ว กว่าไฟจะกลับมาอีกทีก็วันอังคารเลย. อยู่เมืองไทยมาตั้งแต่เด็กก็คิดว่าไฟดับบ่อย แต่ว่าครั้งนึงก็ไม่เกิินชั่วโมง. นี่ไฟดับที 4 วัน. อากาศก็หนาวมากประมาณ 0 องศา พอไม่มี Heater แล้วอยู่ไม่ไหว จะทำอะไรกินกันก็ไม่ได้เพราะเตาก็เป็นเตาไฟฟ้า เลยต้องอพยพไปอยู่บ้านเพื่อนๆที่มีไฟแล้ว. ตอนหลังเพิ่งมารู้ว่ามันดับนานเพราะลมพัดต้นไม้ลุ้มไปทับสายไฟเยอะมาก เลยซ่อมช้า. มือถือก็ใช้ไม่ได้ เพราะว่า Cell tower ก็ไม่มีไฟ. ดูช่าวตอนอยู่บ้านเพื่อนมีคนตายทุกวันเพราะจุดไฟในบ้านแล้วเมา Carbon Monoxide หรือไม่ก็ไฟไหม้บ้านเลย. หลังงานนี้เลยต้องเริ่มเตรียม Emergency Kit ไว้ที่บ้านบ้าง. พวกไฟฉาย วิทยุ ของแห้ง. วิทยุนี่สำคัญกว่าที่คิดมาก เพราะไม่งั้นไม่รู้เลยว่าข้างนอกเกิดอะไรขึ้นบ้าง.

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Seattle in Snow

December 22, 2006 by akezyt.

เพิ่งกลับมาถึง Seattle วันนี้ก็ตกใจเลยเพราะว่าหิมะตกหนักมาก. จริงๆแล้วก็ผิดเองเพราะไม่ได้เช็คอากาศก่อนกลับมาเลย. ตั้งแต่อยเมืองนี้มา็เคยหิมะตกเยอะขนาดนี้เป็นครั้งแรก. ตอนเจ้าหน้าที่ที่ตรวจ Passport บอกว่าวันนี้ Office ปิดก็แอบดีใจ. แต่พอเค้าเตือนว่าเรียก Taxi เค้าอาจไม่ไปก็ได้นะเพราะถนนอาจลื่นมากก็ตกใจ. โชคดี Taxi ใจดียอมมาส่งแล้วก็ถนนโอเค. ระหว่างทางเจอรถจอดอยู่บน Freeway หลายคันทั้งแบบเต็มใจและไม่เต็มใจ (ชนเสาข้างทาง).

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