Complimentary session calendar here: TechDaysOnlineAutumn2013.ics
TechDays Session Calendar
Follow official twitter feed: @TechNetUK
Register for TechDays Online
Here is the Final programme update for each day of UK Tech.Days Online (Autumn 2013) from Wednesday November 6-8.
Don’t miss out!
Posted in Development, Office365, SharePoint, Visual Studio, Win8, Xpert360
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:
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:
Any feedback or enquiries welcome at mailto:info@xpert360.com
Posted in Dynamics CRM, Lightning Series, LightSwitch, SalesForce, Silverlight, SL5, Visual Studio, WCF, WCF Ria Service, Win8, Xpert360
Tagged CRM, Dynamics, lightning series, LightSwitch, microsoft visual studio, SalesForce, silverlight, Visual Studio, VS11
“Integrate the local/on-premise/cloud islands of data into low-cost, agile modern data mashup applications and can they be ready tomorrow, please!”
We received a request to see if salesforce CRM data could be made available for application integration soon followed by a similar request for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online data.
LightSwitch Mashup Application with added Bing, custom visualisations, OpenXML document generation, PivotViewer etc.
Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch was released in 2011 and provides a code-free application building experience designed to appeal to business power users. Since then we have been using it mostly as a RAD prototyping tool.
A characteristic of LightSwitch is its focus on business utility. It presents business-savvy native data types like e-mail and money, including automated validation, input masks and formatting. Although it is a really good platform, it needs extending to reach beyond being a niche product for small developments. Fortunately, it is customizable and extensible and the real power is unleashed when put in the hands of skilled .NET developers.
 |
 |
Most samples and articles concentrate on extending LightSwitch using custom controls, few cover custom data extensions. We will be doing the same in some upcoming posts about data visualisation, Bing maps amd PivotViewer in LightSwitch. Going beyond this and enabling the myriad sources of business data to be consumed by LightSwitch brings new possibilities.
Rather than ‘reinventing the wheel’ we attempted to use other third-party tools but they proved to be inadequate, slow and not designed to fully unlock the potential of LightSwitch. Any commercial custom data adapter needs to be designed to support LightSwitch and other .NET technologies such as MVC3. A LightSwitch data extension that does not natively support data contract metadata, relationships and foreign keys is not really much of a LightSwitch data extension.
CRM Entities in LightSwitch designer with defaults, validation and relationships 'out-of-the-box'
XML underpins the integration of all these application layers and services from XAML screen definitions, LightSwitch metadata, configuration settings, SOAP WDSL’s through to data serialisation and storage.
Full support for SalesForce extended metadata in LightSwitch
So, we designed and built our own and having to use our own software is a good driver for quality. We are currently running a private beta program for the Xpert360 Lightning Series data adapters for salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and are in the final stages of preparing them for general release.
The adapters support most CRUD operations subject to the security context of the connected user. They include efficient caching to speed your applications along and reduce the Web API calls.
Field-level validation inherited automatically from CRM
Using the Web API’s requires a salesforce Enterprise Edition subscription or a developerforce account. To access the Dynamics CRM Online services requires Windows Identity Foundation for the security.
Windows Azure Demonstration accessing SalesForce data
We also have versions of the adapters in testing for Windows Azure, other Dynamics CRM versions (security models and on-premise) and proof of concept projects for HTML5, Windows 8 WinRT and Windows Phone. The availability of support for these variations will be subject to customer demand and platform releases, not least our own application development and custom development service projects.
SalesForce Opportunity in LightSwitch Screen Designer is just a few clicks away
We have already trialled an offline support model that can provide a partial or total mirror of the CRM data. Our initial thoughts are that this will be provided as a part of an ‘Enterprise’ version and custom solutions. This feature has turned out to be an essential aid to internal product testing against a developerforce account. We will be seeking early adopters in this area later in 2012.
SalesForce data replication for offline support in MSMS
We have custom tools to enable rapid building of custom data adapters. This is useful for customers that have installed third-party extensions or modified the CRM schema. You may wish to have a custom adapter that only implements access to a small subset of CRM entities. We may offer lightweight adapters if that is an option that looks viable based upon feedback.
Data update collision detection and resolution features are scheduled for a subsequent release. There are also more features surrounding caching, paging, metadata and custom queries to come as well as non-English versions.
Any feedback or enquiries welcome at mailto:info@xpert360.com
Other useful links:
Posted in Bing, Development, Lightning Series, LightSwitch, LOB, PivotViewer, Silverlight, Win8, WinRT
Tagged Azure, Cloud, Data Extension, Dynamics CRM, Microsoft, SalesForce, Visual Studio LightSwitch, WinRT, Xpert360 Lightning Series
development ideas, comments, reviews and samples from the Xpert360 development team.
Xpert360 Ltd Development Blog 