Learning Resource – Getting started with Silverlight

I have started to have a look at silverlight and found there is a really good resource for getting started with Silverlight

http://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/

It has lots of videos, labs, tutorials.  This is probably a good place to start to get to grips with silverlight.  Looking at all the material I feel there is a long way to go but every long journey starts with one step.

here is what is briefly covered at the site

Start Learning Silverlight

1. Watch Getting Started for Silverlight Web

   Watch Getting Started for Silverlight Out-of-Browser (Desktop)

   Pete Brown introduces the concepts and tools needed to get started with Silverlight development in its two major forms: in-browser and out-of-browser. The web video introduces basic concepts, the out-of-browser video expands those to create a simple Twitter client.

2. Read Tim Heuer’s 8-part blog series on getting started

   Tim’s blog posts will walk you through the fundamentals of Silverlight and will help you build a sample application along the way. Each step includes source code as well as C# and Visual Basic code for the completed application.

3. Watch How Do I Videos

   Over two dozen new Silverlight 4 videos including Jesse Liberty’s new Silverlight 4 From Scratch series.

4. Walk through the QuickStart Tutorials

   The quickstarts walk you through key Silverlight concepts, illustrated on-page with working Silverlight examples and demo applications.

5. Read Jesse Liberty’s Tutorials

   Learn more about Silverlight with Jesse’s tutorial series.

6. Learn to use Expression Blend with .toolbox

   Follow the free, fun Silverlight and Expression courses and tutorials at the Microsoft .toolbox site to understand how to use the key features of Expression Blend. Also consider running through the Project Rosetta tutorials.

 

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CRM 2011 – How to add crmsvcutil to the External tools menu in Visual Studio

I am loving the CRM 2011 early bound functionality.  The one draw back is it you have to run the crmsvcutil quite often if you are adding/removing fields from your entities.

If you want to see a quick example of using the crmsvcutil to generate you classes check this blog out

simple crmsvcutil example

In visual studio under the tools menu there is an External Tools section where you can call exe’s, pass them some variables and run them.  crmsvcutil is a prime candidate for that.

so go to the Tools/External Tools

Click Add

Give it a cool title like – Awesome crmsvcutil tool

in the command you need to specify the location of the crmsvcutil.exe

here is mine – C:\Hosk Stuff\crm\CRM2011\sdk\bin\crmsvcutil.exe

in the arguements you put in the arguements you want to pass to crmsvcutil.exe

/url:http://crmserver:5555/crmorganisationname/xrmServices/2011/Organization.svc /out:earlyboundclasses.cs /username:hosk /password:Hoskspassword

finally you specify the initial directory which is where you want the output to go

C:\

I just put in on the c drive for now.

So there we go, it should be such a choir to build your early bound classes any more.

web.Config Error – duplicate scriptResourceHandler section defined

this was the annoying error I was being plagued with today

Config Error There is a duplicate ‘system.web.extensions/scripting/scriptResourceHandler’ section defined

I was getting this error today and it was very annoying but then when you work out what the problem is quite interesting, especially if like me you are studying for the 70-515 .NET web applications exam.

A bit of background.  I had created a website, it was a demo website and in the website it had a sectionGroup with the name of scripting.

<sectionGroup name=”scripting” type=”System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35″>

When I tried to run the website it then popped up with the annoying duplicate error.

The way ASP.NET works is you have default settings held in the machine.config.  These are used by all Web sites using that version of .NET, in this case 4.

When you create a website, you can over write the machine.config settings and have local setting specified in your web apps web.config.

 

The reason I was getting duplicate errors was because it was almost the same reference, except one of them was 3.5 and one of them was 4.0.  Depending on what server you have got (in on iis 7) you can find the machine.config somewhere around here

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Config

 

local web.config

<sectionGroup name=”system.web.extensions” type=”System.Web.Configuration.SystemWebExtensionsSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35″>

 

machine.config

<sectionGroup name=”scripting” type=”System.Web.Configuration.ScriptingSectionGroup, System.Web.Extensions, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35″>

 

to solve the problem I deleted the sectiongroup from my local web.config and then the problem went away.

for more information I found these web links useful

http://forums.iis.net/t/1149226.aspx

http://www.britishdeveloper.co.uk/2010/03/there-is-duplicate-systemwebextensionss.html

CRM – How to get rid of the CRM export to Excel warning message

I found this blog on the Customer Effective Blog (which is one of my favourite CRM hangouts) via clicking on Anne Stanton’s blog (known in the CRM world as the CRMLady) who was commenting on a twitter post of mine which was posted to linkedin.

In other words CRM is a small world but it’s well formed with lots of knowledge people helping each other out.  It also reminds me of the phrase “history repeats itself”, and good CRM blog certainly get repeated all over the place.

I never thought you would be able to remove the message but I am keen to give it a go.

 

Getting Rid of the CRM Export to Excel Warning Message

When you export to Excel from CRM, when you open the exported spreadsheet in Excel, you will receive the following warning:

This warning is due to a security feature in Excel 2007 and greater that checks the contents of a file to make sure that they match the file extension.  Given that the CRM data is exported using XML and saved with an .xls format, Excel doesn’t think that the format of the file is correct.

While this is probably designed to prevent some legitimate security concerns, it winds up having the opposite effect for people who export frequently from Excel—since this message will be popping up for them frequently, they will be conditioned to always click “Yes,” and as a result be prone to allow more legitimate security warnings to be ignored.

There are two options for getting rid of this warning:

1.  Group Policy – Adam Vero at the “Getting IT Right” blog has a good post on how to globally suppress this warning using group policy. http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2010/07/01/annoying-file-format-warning-when-exporting-crm-records-to-excel/

2.  Per Computer – You can easily get rid of this warning using a simple registry change on your computer.  The following instruction are for Excel 2010.  If you have 2007, the only change would be the location of the registry folder will be …\Microsoft\OFFICE\12.0\EXCEL\SECURITY.  Normal warnings apply—don’t modify your registry unless you know what you are doing.

1. Open your Registry (Start -> Run -> regedit.exe)
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\OFFICE\14.0\EXCEL\SECURITY
3. Right click in the right window and choose New -> DWORD
4. Type “ExtensionHardening” as the name (without the quotes)
5. Verify that the data has the value “0″