This is not a "user" book, it's a developer book.  I might even go as far as saying a power admin that wants to understand more about what's going on would benefit as well.  The book goes deeper into developer topics like client scripting, web services, plug-ins and workflow than any of the other books currently released.

Most of the chapters in the book have samples that go along with them.  There's also a Jump Start Framework that's over 13,000 lines of reusable code to jump start your learning of the platform. The license of the code is simple buy the book use the code....any questions?  It includes things like client script to make calling the web services easier - no more concatenating strings and hoping it works. It also includes plug-ins, workflow activities and more. I will be blogging more in the future about some of the cool things in the samples  and the framework that you can leverage.  Realistically, even if you only used a few lines of the code it would pay back for the book 2-3 times over.

The book is available from the book web site http://www.thecrmbook.com and will be available in a month or so on Amazon and other retailers.  The book is also available in e-book with simple content control - no complicated DRM (rights management) to drive you nuts.  I've also started recording How-To videos here.  They are starting really basic, but I will be diving deeper over time. If you have request send them my way.

Since you put up with my blog posts, I wanted to make it worth your while since many of you helped shape the content of the book.  When you purchase your copy if you put daveblog in the discount code field on the checkout you will receive $10.00 off your print book purchase.

Why are you still here? Go buy your copy here http://www.thecrmbook.com/Purchase/PurchaseBook.aspx

One of the things to get your head around is the different editions.  There's of course Standard and Enterprise but there are also specialized editions.  The specialized editions are Workgroup, Web, Compact and Express.  Web was the one that I hadn't seen carved out before. It's for low cost, large scale web targeted at shared hosting and large web apps that need scale out.  Read more here.   A summary of all the editions can be found here.

There's also detail comparisons of the versions like Enterprise vs. Standard here.  These make a great read to get your head around what's in each edition.   If your like me I always pay more attention to certain features and this gives me a broader look at all the features.  One thing is clear, Enterprise clearly has some differential features from standard.  This seems especially true around the BI /DW side of the world. if you want to see a more detailed comparison across all the editions you can find that here.

Another interesting read is the Whitepaper on hosting on Win 2008 (here).  One thing that I found interesting was the focus on consolidation with Virtual Database servers.  I'm really interested to kick the tires on the final release of this and hyper-v and see how they perform.  On the licensing front, the paper said "Enterprise edition, a single SQL Server license is valid for unlimited instances of SQL Server in multiple virtual machines on the same physical computer."  That seems like another step towards more friendly virtualization licensing.

Moving to SQL 2008?

Before you just jump out and upgrade everything to SQL 2008 make sure you do a bit of planning.  Probably the biggest thing is to make sure that any application you depend on is ready to run on SQL 2008.  I know some vendor applications will take a little bit to ensure they are compatible with the final release.  Now that SQL has released they can start their final checks.

A good place to start thinking about upgrading is here.  You can find information on planning for upgrade and also an Upgrade Advisor tool that will analyze and give feedback.  Detailed backward compatibility info can be found here.

When the MSDN group was announcing some other changes not too long ago - I said HEY! what about fixing those stupid menu's.  Myself and a number of others also provided feedback and they went out to the community for a broader poll and from that revised the UI.  It didn't take too long before the results were launched.

On Wednesday, they launch the new UI and it looks and works a ton better from my first test drive! You can read their announcement post here.  I usually dread having to go to the MSDN download site, with the new navigation it should be much better now!  Even with having to login on the fly, it didn't lose my place and make me re-navigate!

Great job!

Last week I had the privilege of previewing a couple of the sessions that will be given and I wanted to highlight them in case you are heading to WPC.

The first is on using CRM and software plus services - the actual session details:

DYN007 Expanding Your Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business with Software plus Services  Wednesday, July 9 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM, 370 ABCDEF

Now if you read the description of the session it sounds like a lot of marketing speak don't give up, the reason I think it's interesting was the demo's I saw and the discussion I heard during my preview. Mitchell Humphrey Software will talk about their reduced time to market leveraging CRM as a platform.  They started with a "get to know the platform" period and then rapidly moved to build their solution using it.  Mondo is another ISV that will be featured.  I'm excited to see them features both because we have helped them off and on and I also think they demonstrate use of Silveright beyond some of the wiz bang use on the web.  They use Silverlight 2 to extend CRM's core UX features to add a more interactive process for the user to a Solution Selling application.  To often Silvelight get's portrayed as a great video player technology, when it has great potential for use in LOB applications as well.

The other session I saw was on developing ISV solutions - the action session details:

DYN010 Developing and Going to Market with Your ISV Solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM    Wednesday, July 9 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM, 371 ABDE

Not sure the layout of the WPC, but looks like this session is right next door!  Nikhil Hasija is the presenter for this session and will talk about ISV opportunities - CourseMax will be talking about how they integrated and leveraged the CRM platform  and how they also included several of the Live.com tools such as Virtual Earth and Live Messenger APIs.   AlfaPeople will also be featured - what caught my eye that they had was their technology for helping to packaging up and provisioning ISV solutions.  I think their techniques for provisioning would be interesting to any ISV that was offering a hosted type solution and had to manage provisioning of it.

So if you make it to WPC, drop me a note and let me know if you see any cool stuff! 

Today we had that happen on a solution and when we used the setup we were getting an error during the actual install on the target machine.  Turns out to be not related at all, however, it got me digging around trying to figure out what caused the build to fail.  I ran across the following connect bug that has a work around

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/Workaround.aspx?FeedbackID=317870

Turns out,  that adding a  LINQ to SQL dbml file or the L2S designer in use in Visual Studio can cause this error to happen.  Sure enough removing the ItemGroup mentioned in the workaround and restarted VS and the build worked.

The real bummer is I get the same build failed on my machines with SP1 beta on them so that means it probably won't be fixed soon.

This release also appears to include support for plain CLR and Data Services that were in the Dynamic Data Extensions project that was available for download.

Read the full list here http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=14475

You can also find more details on Marcin's blog here

The reason you care is you are not able to update / modify an item mapped to Defining Query.   Currently, the designer doesn't give an indication that it's a read-only entity  - it would be great if in the future it could visually show it in the designer.

There are a few clue's to tell this has occurred, first, you Entity will have every eligible column marked as part of the Entity Key(basically all non nullable / non binary) .   You can also view the markup for the SSDL, and you will see the Defining Query when you look at that table in the store markup.  The most obvious indication this exists if you try to update it you will get the following error "Unable to update the EntitySet 'Events' because it has a DefiningQuery and no <DeleteFunction> element exists in the <ModificationFunctionMapping> element to support the current operation".

When the Generate From DB runs, it also creates an informational message to tell you this has happened.  It says something like " The table/view 'DemoTable' does not have a primary key defined. The key has been inferred and the definition was created as a read-only table/view.  "

On a new DB, this can easily happen during the initial stages if you add the table to the EDM before the real key is added.  To fix, you can add the proper key to the database then update the model from the database again to pickup the change.

After the update, you will have to manually correct the entity key's on the Entity as currently in V1, it only updates the definition in the store, and not the conceptual definition.

As indicated in the error above, you can also map to stored procedures and leave it a Defining Query.  That is typically done when you intended to use a Defining Query and not when it happened just because there's no key.

I think it would be great if the Generate From Db wizard would give you warnings before the generate was completed.  This would be especially important when you are updating an existing model if there was any potential problem that could be avoided. 

I've also been following more of the community forums and blogs on EF.   People are asking a lot of great questions and sharing a lot of good ideas.  Like all big changes, V1 won't solve everyone's problems or be a good fit for everyone to adopt.  But it does set the stage with a solid foundation to build on.

If you haven't spent time in the forums, the EF team has been busy answering questions as well as starting to collect what features people want in V2.  Today, they took that a step further by setting up a Entity Framework Design blog that they plan to keep updated as they go through the V2 design process sharing as much as they can with the community.  If you read nothing else, read Tim Mallalieu's first post on the blog that outlines the intent of the transparency. 

How, When, If you adopt Entity Framework is an individual architecture choice each architect has to make for their company.  I never think you should just blindly adopt a Microsoft or any vendor technology just because it's released.  That said, you do need to evaluate and find ones that give you an advantage or speed up development or meet other goals.  Sometimes that even means not using all the advanced features from day 1.  If you use any Data Access (like who doesn't) you owe it to yourself to get involved and help shape the feature set for V2 - but first you probably need to get your hands around what V1 offers!   Remember, just reading a overview isn't the same as kicking the tires!

I've had my talks and presentations interrupted by a number of different things including people turning on/off lights and of course the typical joker in the crowd but never had to evacuate the building before!

Jonathan Carter and myself were at the Microsoft office in Sydney last week giving a class on .NET 3.5 SP1 features.  I had just started one of my demo applications to explain some features of Entity Framework when all of a sudden the building alarm went off.  Like most big buildings in the US, the fire brigade had to respond and clear the building before we were able to return.  Rumors are that it really wasn't my demo that caused it but low water pressure in the building!