Lightning Series for Salesforce CRM released

Xpert360 Lightning Series for Salesforce released!

This week saw the release of the next Lightning Series product aimed at bringing together Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch with Salesforce. We are expecting to see a surge in uptake of LightSwitch as VS11 beta approaches release. Add to that Office365, the rollout of Windows 8 and the next version of Visual Studio. The Lightning Series products will be addressing the integration and productivity needs of this market space bringing together disparate data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM online/on-premise, Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, Nimble, Office365 and more…

The products are professionally developed commercial software with support contracts available. The difference is the commitment of Xpert360 to deliver FREE product licenses for everyone. This policy will continue provided that there is enough interest from the communities and enough revenue is raised from add-on work and custom versions for Enterprise use. The more people use the Lightning Series products, the better they will get and everyone will benefit.

We develop and use code generation technology rather than purely develop the actual products themselves. This helps us to drive down development costs and is allowing us to transition these activites to the cloud and SaaS over the next year.

The next release of the Salesforce adapter is expected by the end of June 2012 and there is still time for user feedback into the release program.

The next Lightning Series LightSwitch Data Source to be released will support zendesk. We decided that because we are using it ourselves. After that we will be looking for feedback to gauge the demand to prioritize the release other data adapters for the likes of HubSpot, nimble and Office365. The series will soon include other custom controls and very importantly, Enterprise-class productivity tools aimed at LightSwitch to make the platform irresistible.

For more information visit the Xpert360 Support and Forums and follow this blog to see how the story unfolds.

• Further details: XPERT360 LIGHTNING SERIES
• Getting started: QUICK START GUIDES
• Working with Salesforce and Dynamics CRM in VS11
• Using Salesforce and Dynamics CRM with LightSwitch
• Visual Studio Gallery: View and Download

Visual Studio Gallery – Xpert360 Lightning Series for Salesforce

Visual Studio Gallery entry

Working with SalesForce and Dynamics CRM data in Visual Studio 11 Beta

Microsoft Visual Studio 11 beta and Windows 8 Consumer Previews were made available on Feb 29th 2012. They will be valid through to June 2012.

The Xpert360 development team took the beta for a spin with the latest versions of the Xpert360 Lightning Series product builds: WCF Ria Service data source extensions for LightSwitch and .NET 4 that connect to salesforce and Dynamics CRM Online instances.

VS11 Beta Premium Applying: LightSwitch Beta Core

After the VS11 install a quick rebuild of the data extensions VSIX in VS2010 pulled in the latest software versioning as shown below:

Clip for LightSwitch Data Extension vsixmanifest

The new VSIX files now prompt for the version of Visual Studio if not already installed and within ten minutes of the VS11 install we are building our first Visual Studio LightSwitch 11 application to interact with our CRM test systems.

LightSwitch project templates in VS11 Beta

Then we create new data connections with the Xpert360 Lightning Data Extensions.

LightSwitch designer - Choose a WCF Ria Service!

… and we move on and choose some of the CRM entities exposed by the service.

LightSwitch designer - Select Data Source Objects from Dynamics CRM Online

The chosen entities appear against the data source in the LightSwitch designer and can be explored and manipulated as usual. Notice the automatically available entity relationships between the salesforce entities.

LightSwitch designer - SalesForce Opportunity Entity with chosen subset fo relationships

A few more clicks to build a list detail screen…

LightSwitch designer - Xpert360 Lightning Data Extensions

Ten minutes later we have our first CRM data from salesforce and Dynamics CRM Online.

LightSwitch - SalesForce Opportunities List Details at your disposal

Looking around in the VS11 IDE the default theme has faded to grey, perhaps its vying for an Oscar with ”The Artist”. Here are the two LightSwitch project views available in solution explorer:

LightSwitch designer - Logical and File views

If you are embarking on custom UI controls with Silverlight 5 then here are the available project templates in VS11:

VS11 Beta Silverlight project templates

We are also eagerly awaiting the VS11 LightSwitch Extensibility Toolkit which has been indicated to be ready in a few weeks by Beth Massi:

• Visual Studio LightSwitch Team Blog

The Xpert360 Lightning Series data extensions will unleash the true power of LightSwitch onto your salesforce CRM and Dynamics CRM Online data very soon. They are currently undergoing private beta testing which will now be extended to include the VS11 Beta as this platfrom has a go-live license.

If you somehow missed all the anouncements here are the links:

• Announcing LightSwitch in Visual Studio 11 Beta! – LS Team blog
• Welcome to the Beta of VS11 and .NET 4.5 – Jason Zanders Weblog
• Visual Studio 11 Beta downloads – Microsoft Visual Studio

Any feedback or enquiries welcome at mailto:info@xpert360.com

PivotViewer Shorts Part 4: Restyle the ZoomSlider child controls

Introduction

By default the SL4 PivotViewer control displays a custom control for controling the zoom-level of the tile views. A few people have expressed a wish to totally reskin the control and this is a step along that path that hints at the technique needed to dig deeper into the PivotViewer visual tree.

 

This short post shows how to locate the UI element for the control bar, the ZoomSlider, all its visual elements and then alter their background.

 

PivotViewer ZoomSlider Re-Styling

 

Locating the UI Elements

The flow of the code goes something like this:

• Locate the “PART_Container” in the tree. This is a Grid control.
• Or… go direct to the “PART_ControlBar” element.
• Locate the ControlBarView to access the child controls.
• Build a list of child controls using VisualTreeHelper.

// Locate UI Elements
    ControlBarView ControlBar = (ControlBarView)this.GetTemplateChild(“PART_ControlBar”);
    Grid ctrlBarContent = (Grid)ControlBar.Content;
    DockPanel ctrlBarDockPanel = (DockPanel)ctrlBarContent.Children[2];
    ContentControl ZoomSlider = (ContentControl)ctrlBarDockPanel.Children[2];
    ContentControl cc1 = (ContentControl)ZoomSlider.Content;
//
// Build a list of the child controls
    var ctrls = GetChildsRecursive(cc1);
//
// Pick out controls and re-style as you wish 
    foreach (UIElement ctrl in ctrls)
    {
        string s = ctrl.GetType().ToString();
        switch (s)
        {
            case “System.Windows.Controls.Button”:
            Button b = (Button)ctrl;
            b.Background = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Orange);
            break;
        case “Microsoft.Pivot.Internal.Controls.ClickDragSlider”:
            ClickDragSlider cds3 = (ClickDragSlider)ctrl;
            cds3.Background = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Green);
            break;
        default:
            break;
        }
    }
;

// Helper function for child controls
IEnumerable<DependencyObject> GetChildsRecursive(DependencyObject root)
{
    List<DependencyObject> elts = new List<DependencyObject>();
    elts.Add(root);
    for (int i = 0; i < VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(root); i++)
        elts.AddRange(GetChildsRecursive(VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(root, i)));
    return elts;
}

+

FAQ

If you want to try out the code there are a few things to watch out for.

+

You will need some internal Microsoft Pivot references and usings too. Depending upon the extent of your other customizations you will need these:

+

using System.Windows.Pivot;
using Microsoft.Pivot.Internal.Controls;
using Microsoft.Pivot.Internal.Model;
using Microsoft.Pivot.Internal.ViewModels;
using Microsoft.Pivot.Internal.Views;

+

Further things to do

• Xpert360 PivotViewer Blog Article Index
• The code should be nicely wrapped up and encapsulated in the CustomPivotViewer override class.
• PivotViewer Control – Public API
• Microsoft Silverlight Forums – PivotViewer Control
• Xpert360 Ltd – who allow time for blogging

Conclusion

This article is a brief guide to locating some visual elements of the Silverlight PivotViewer control in order to customize the styling of the ZoomSlider control. It targets the developer who has already started customizing the Silverlight PivotViewer control beyond the public API.

 

Any comments or request for future topics are welcome.

 

Debugging Data Bindings in XAML with Silverlight 4

[Last updated: 2011-05-24]

Introduction

Yes, you read it correctly, Silverlight 4.

 

How can I do that?

Simply install the VS2010 SP1 and Silverlight 5 Beta and you get the unexpected bonus of the XAML Parser supporting debugging your data bindings for your Silverlight 4 projects. As SL5 sits nicely in VS2010 SP1 with SL4 it is worth installing the beta just for this feature.

Debugging XAML Binding in Silverlight 4 - bonus!

I was at the @SLUGUK meeting 18th May 2011, and as Mike Taulty pointed out for other ‘features’, it is difficult to know whether such things as this were introduced by the service pack or the beta as nobody seems to have stopped to check in the rush to get the SL5 beta working

Checked against the NoDo Windows Phone 7 projects and it does not work, you can set a breakpoint but it cannot resolve the symbols. The new feature automatically creates the symbol names for you. I am optimistic that this feature will work with the Mango tooling to be released by end of May 2011 (that’s next week) [UPDATE: Mango beta no Xaml debugging for now].

No point in re-documenting the feature so:

Mike Taulty’s Blog: Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes – Debugging Data-Binding

Code Project: Debugging Data Bindings in XAML with SIlverlight 5 Beta

Further things to do and resources 

• PivotViewer Home – Microsoft Silverlight
• Microsoft Silverlight Forums – PivotViewer Control
• Xpert360 Ltd – who allow time for blogging

Conclusion

This article shows a nice side-effect encountered for Silverlight 5 projects after installing the Silverlight 5 Beta. Whether it is intended or here to stay we will have to wait and see but it has already proved to be a fantastic ROI.

 

Any comments or request for future topics are welcome.

Xpert360 PivotViewer Blog Article Index

[Last updated: 2011-06-22]

Introduction

This post is intended to be a landing place to bring together links to our growing collection of PivotViewer articles in one place. We will update this article to reflect new blog posts and other useful links.

If you are not familiar with overriding the Silverlight PivotViewer control’s OnApplyTemplate() method then I recommend taking the time to work through the posts in the ‘Adventures with PivotViewer’ series and build up your portfolio of customization skills.

These articles are based on the version of the control shipped separately from the Silverlight 4 SDK. We will update and extend articles with information relevant to Silverlight 5 SDK as they become available. If you are already customizing your PivotViewer experience then dive right in:

Adventures with PivotViewer

• Part 1: Background work
• Part 2: Themes and Integrated DataGrid
• Part 3: Localization
• Part 4: Augmented PDC10 reality – pivot the agenda
• Part 5: Pimp my PivotViewer
• Part 6: Pimp it sample code
• Part 7: Slider control
• Part 8: Filter pane tooltips
• Part 9: Multi-Layered Trading Cards tooltips
• Part 10: Let’s do the Timelapse Warp

PivotViewer Shorts

• Part 1: Hide Filter Pane Search Box
• Part 2: Hide View and SortBy Buttons
• Part 3: Hide Collection Path
• Part 4 Restyle the ZoomSlider child controls
• Part 5: Invert the Facet Category Selection

PivotViewer Miscellaneous

• Visualization of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace with PivotViewer
• PivotViewer vNext in Silverlight 5 SDK

Examples on the Internet

• BioPivot – University of Oxford, UK
• Buxton Collection – Bill Buxton’s UX devices
• Classic Cardboard – ProjectVerona
• Cricket Video Vault – Blackcaps
• Flickr Demo – LobsterPot
• Good Coffee Good Code – Chris Arnold
• percollate – social media dashboard
• PhotoPivot – organize your photo collection
• tweetpivot – pivot the twitterverse
• Microsoft BI Customers – BI > Solutions > Customers
• MVPChat – MVP Twitter Threads
• Netflix instant watch movies+ – Windows Azure Team
• PivotViewer Interactive Demos – Official Microsoft Silverlight
• Fourth Coffee
• Endangered Species
• New Cars
• World Leaders
• The TEAM Project – UCSD and Conservation International
• Top SharePoint Internet Sites – WSSDEMO
• Windows Phone 7 Marketplace
• WP7 App Hub

Further things to do and resources

• PivotViewer Home – Microsoft Silverlight
• PivotViewer Control – Public API
• Sample Code for JIT PivotViewer Collections
• Download Pivot Application – Microsoft Research
• Microsoft Silverlight Forums – PivotViewer Control
• MVP Tony Champion tutorials
• Xpert360 Ltd – who allow time for blogging

Conclusion

This article is an anchor page to our blog articles concerning the Silverlight PivotViewer control. There are a range of articles topics and technical levels. Some target the developer who is ready to start customizing the Silverlight PivotViewer control beyond the documented public API, whilst others show examples of what can be achieved.

Any comments or request for future topics are welcome.

Adventures with PivotViewer Part 9: Multi-Layered Trading Cards

Silverlight PivotViewer Layered Trading Cards - click to view video

Introduction

Adding multi-layered trading cards is a feature enabled by the XAML data template trading card support for the version of the Silverlight PivotViewer control that will be distributed in the Silverlight 5 SDK. This article shows you how to implement a similar effect in the previous version of the control.

If you are new to our blog then you may care to take the time to work through the other posts in this series and build up you portfolio of PivotViewer customization skills.

• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 1: Background work
• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 2: Themes and Integrated DataGrid
• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 3: Localization
• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 4: Augmented PDC10 reality – pivot the agenda
• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 5: Pimp my PivotViewer
• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 6: Pimp it sample code
• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 7: Slider control
• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 8: Filter pane tooltips
• Adventures with PivotViewer Part 9: Multi-Layered Trading Cards tooltips 
• Visualization of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace with PivotViewer
• PivotViewer vNext in Silverlight 5 SDK

Deep Zoom Collections and Images

Silverlight PivotViewer Product Catalogue basic collection images

The easiest way to achieve this effect is to generate a full set of deep zoom collection imagery for each desired layer. Also generate full sets of deep zoom images for the desired layers of the trading cards.

 

Simply merge together the folders of the image layers according to your trading cards layer designs. By default the layers 0 to 7, equating to deep zoom folders 0 to 7, are used for the deep zoom collection imagery for the lower resolutions. Only the layers 8 and above are used at runtime by PivotViewer for the individual deep zoom images: folders 7 and below can be deleted and do not need deploying.

 

PivotViewer Low-Res Trading Card Image transition

 

It is important that all source images for a trading card are the same height and width. The PivotViewer Excel tool is useful for trying this as you can simply copy the Excel spreadsheet and replace the trading card images.

 

I would suggest that you use common low resolution images for the zoomed out top layers of the deep zoom pyramid. For the primary theme choose a facet category with fewest values that can be represented by color. Choose images that represent a secondary attribute such as a category-type facet. By following this approach the users can quickly and easily work with the collection trading cards at low resolutions by visual association of color and category icon.

 

PivotViewer Hi-Res Trading Card Image Transitions

 

At the other end of the scale with the highest resolution images you probably will want more information, mini-graphs, etc. These images can be captured from a simple custom tool that uses a XAML data template bound to the collection data. If you do this you ought to be able to reuse your code with the vNext version of PivotViewer.

 

PivotViewer Trading Card Hi-Res from XAML

 

Further things to do

• PivotViewer Control – Public API
• Microsoft Silverlight Forums – PivotViewer Control
• MVP Tony Champion tutorials
• Xpert360 Ltd – who allow time for blogging

Conclusion

This article is just a brief run through that introduces multi-layered visualization of Silverlight PivotViewer control trading cards. It targets the developer who has already started customizing the Silverlight PivotViewer control in preparation for the next version scheduled to be distributed with the Silverlight 5 SDK. Any comments or request for future topics are welcome.

PivotViewer vNext in Silverlight 5 SDK

Original post is here: xpert360.wordpress.com
Only view on original blog to avoid malicious sites

[Last updated: 2011-05-19]

MIX11 Agenda - Advanced Features in Silverlight 5

The Las Vegas MIX11 conference has come and gone. Windows Phone 7 “Mango”, Internet Explorer 10 platform preview, HTML 5, Silverlight 5 beta and Kinect SDK.

 

If you were interested in the next version of the Silverlight PivotViewer control you would be forgiven if you missed it as the MIX11 site had the “New Technologies for Immersive Content Creation” tagged as PivotViewer on April 14th 2011. The actual session of interest for the vNext PivotViewer was Nick Kramer giving a presentation entitled “Advanced Features in Silveright 5″ in the same session slot. The RN Studio (Alpha) session included using a PivotViewer collection asset, the 2009 IUCN Red List Species. This was interesting but nothing new as far as PivotViewer version.

 

New Technologies for Immersive Content CreationDate: April 14, 2011 from 3:00PM to 4:00PM | Day 3 | RES06 | Speakers: Eric Stollnitz, Joseph Joy

 

Advanced Features in Silverlight 5Date: April 14, 2011 from 3:00PM to 4:00PM | Day 3 | MED12 | Speakers: Nick Kramer

 

PivotViewer is flagged as coming soon post-beta as it did not make the cut for the Silverlight 5 SDK beta release. To live up to this status the PivotViewer control crashed with an access violation mid-demo as Nick looks on and adlibs.

 

PivotViewer vNext crashes at MIX11

 

“PivotViewer V1 was shipped in June 2010 separately from Silverlight, the V1 came in its own SDK download”. There was then a maintenance release in September 2010. “There was a lot of good feedback to Microsoft about the control but a lot of people said they wanted to take it to the next level”.

Nick said “We want to take that Pivot experience that lets you analyze large datasets in a very rich visual way, create interactive graphs, filter on the fly, figure out which part of the data is interesting to you.”

 

“We want to bring that to more scenarios make it easier to plug in your data”

• Ships as part of the SL5 SDK
• Dynamic client-based collections (ItemSource, binding)
• XAML-based visuals (trading card templates)
• Customizability (fonts, colors, sizes)

 

PivotViewer XAML templated tiles at MIX11

 

We first had a glimpse of the vNext control during the Silverlight Firestarter keynote in December 2010. Since then the sample demonstration has moved on to show more of the XAML template driven trading cards. Nick’s demonstration showed building trading cards with standard Silverlight DataTemplates and data binding to the Pivot collection. You can define one or more layouts which are automatically faded in/out by PivotViewer based on user-defined tile size thresholds (in pixels). So you see different trading card visuals based on the zoom level which was previously harder work to achieve with deep zoom image collections.

 

PivotViewer XAML data templates at MIX11

 

The newly exposed client side collection feature is implemented using the usual ItemsSource property of the control. This brings generation and manipulation of your Pivot collections in line with other Silverlight controls.

 

Where does this leave us?

 

Ships as part of the SL5 SDK

• So the PivotViewer vNext control now joins the SDK family of controls.
• When will we get to download and use it? We just don’t know, officially just later in 2011.
• Without a clear roadmap or detailed feature list this does leave existing development users in somewhat of an uncertain position.
• In many ways there are far more questions than answers raised so far from the brief glimpses afforded to us.

 

Dynamic client-based collections

• Dynamic data in SL5 will be available the same as any other data context, on the client, and is to be welcomed.
• This has been interpreted by some as the end of CXML-based collections. It has not yet been said that the new dynamic data will replace CXML.
• So will both old and new methods of supplying collections be available?
• Will existing collections have an easy upgrade path?
• We saw add-to-collection, are item data updates and item removal working too?
• The answer appears to be yes to all these questions. The collection building has been separated from the visuals and existing CXML collections can be loaded as is. There are some issues with the visuals to be resolved.

 

XAML-based visuals

• The new method, whilst highly applicable to line-of-business applications, is it suitable for photography collections?
• Are Deep Zoom based CXML collection still supported?
  Define multiple visuals in XAML for different zoom levels, with this new structure how well does it scale?
• How well does it perform with the image processing on the client?
• Collection size was advised as up to 3,000 items, we squeezed acceptable performance with 10,000 items. with all the UI structures and memory use how well does this scale now on the client?
• XAML DataTemplate trading cards, are they still ‘dumb’ bitmaps or allow UI interaction?
• Do we still have support for PivotViewer ‘CustomActions’?

 

Customizability

• New access to fonts, colors, sizes.
• Any access to Backgrounds and Borders – filter panel, info panel, collection views?
• Header customizations – hide collection path, filter criteria?
• Customization of filter panels beyond fonts?
• We have not yet seen custom info panel limits, how does this work?
• Support for user-supplied XAML custom views? – view menu buttons, location for geolocation, maps, other graphical visualizations

 

Links

• The Future of Microsoft Silverlight
• Silverlight Team Blog
• Silverlight.net
• Silverlight Forum – PivotViewer Control
• MIX11 Sessions Pivot Collection

 

MIX11 OpenCall Voting – Session picker

MIX11 PivotViewer Sessions containing Geolocation

We are really looking forward to MIX11 and with 207 sessions to choose from, we decided to take a couple of hours and put together a Pivot collection to provide a little help with narrowing down exactly which sessions you want to vote for.

Run the Silverlight MIX11 OPEN CALL application. As with all silverlight apps, works fine on most browsers and OS.

MIX11 PivotViewer Sessions on Razor

MIX11 PivotViewer Session Speakers

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