A new version of the CRM 4.0 SDK was released on 8/29/2008.  You can get this newest version here:  CRM 4.0.6 SDK. 

This afternoon I was playing around with the new Live Search macros.  For a while I have wanted a simple way for a limited scope search against all MSCRM feeds.  The Live Search team has a very cool macro capability that makes this easy.  Please try out my Dynamics CRM Blog Search page - if you are a Dynamics CRM geek like me then I think that you will want to bookmark this and use it frequently.  It uses a new macro feature of Live Search to scope your search down to only MSCRM blogs.  It is especially cool that you can add this search to your browser search box.  And if you don't like mine, you can create your own!  If you create your own MSCRM macro, please comment on this post to share it with me and the rest of the community. 

This arrived in my email box today: The Microsoft Dynamics CRM User Group (CRMUG) is now live at http://crmug.com. CRMUG is an association of companies sharing the common interest of optimizing their usage of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in their companies. The CRMUG was launched to enable Dynamics CRM customers and partners to network and share knowledge and experience enabling them to maximize the value of their MSCRM investment.  There is a free 90 day trial available - the offer is on the home page. 

This is an interesting eWeek article discussing how Microsoft Dynamics Live CRM will include an on-demand marketplace for partners to showcase their company, applications, solutions, and customers.  The article says that this is similar to Saleforce.com's AppExchange.  The concept of an on-demand environment for customers to shop for solutions is fantastic.  In my experience many customers do not want just simple vanilla CRM.  They have specific customization needs - either vertical requirements (ex. real estate, 311 case management, etc.) and horizontal requirements (marketing analytics, event management, etc.).  This marketplace will enable a customer to shop and buy functionality a la carte.  If it catches on it may spawn a new developer industry.  For a good example see this article in Redmond Developer also published today.  The first Facebook developer conference was held recently with over 750 developers in attendance!  Facebook is taking off in large part because of the many creative applications that it's partners have developed for it's site. 

At WPC, Microsoft announced additional details about the upcoming CRM Live (aka Dynamics Live CRM).  In case you missed it, a year ago at the 2006 WPC Steve Ballmer announced CRM Live.  CRM Live is a hosted Dynamics CRM enabling organizations to purchase CRM services on a subscription basis.  Dynamics CRM Live is a Microsoft hosted "software as a service" offering.  Microsoft will host all of the CRM infrastructure.  Customers will not need to buy and manage the software, hardware and associated IT infrastructure.  Microsoft does all of that for you.  Customers can just sign up for a subscription and immediately start using the product.  This offering will be based on the next version of CRM, code named "Titan".   In addition to the Dynamics CRM Live pricing and licensing details, the article also mentions the partner engagement model and announces two vertical templates.  One that is near and dear to yours truly is the Public Sector template that will ship at the end of July 2007.  More about that is forthcoming.... Dynamics Live CRM is Microsoft's opportunity to challenge Salesforce.com.  You can read what Jeff Raikes said about this in this Business Week article.   

My role at Microsoft is the US Public Sector Dynamics Architect.   This is a field-based technical position.  I work on a sales team as the technical lead.  Our team works with Federal, State, Local Government as well as K-12 and Higher-Education customers.  We focus specifically on Microsoft's Dynamics products.  I am a 13 year Microsoft veteran with a developer background.  Two years ago I switched into this role.  For me the attraction is that Dynamics as a huge new market opportunity for Microsoft.  We have invested billions in these products.  In many ways I enjoy being the underdog.  Microsoft is the underdog against some of the more established tier one ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle.  Siebel and Salesforce.com are also established competitors in the CRM space.  Being the underdog reminds me of my experiences in the early and mid 90s as a softie.  I can remember when SQL Server, Windows Server, MS Mail and other products were not ready for the enterprise.  But the company continued to invest and work at it and now nobody disputes that Microsoft is an enterprise company.  The Dynamics products are maturing rapidly and are already enterprise ready. The product teams listen closely to those of us in the field because everyone understands that we need to rapidly evolve these products to meet customer needs.  July 1 is the beginning of our new fiscal year.  One of my New Years resolutions is to blog more.  I plan to write about our solutions and success with Dynamics CRM as a development platform.  Check back here over the coming weeks and months.  I will share my thoughts and experiences with Dynamics CRM.  

  Wow.  I am totally blown away by Biztalk Services.  Simply put, it is an ESB in the cloud.  This is still early CTP quality, but worth learning about.  I think that this could represent the future of web services and application development.  It has the potential to change the game in terms of application development and integration across organization boundaries.    Here is the channel 9 video" with John Shewchuk and Dennis Pilarinos. John is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and the lead for this effort. Dennis shows off some awesome demos. The video is a must-see.   You can learn more and download the SDK from labs.biztalk.net.  It took me only 10 minutes to download and install the SDK, register, and have the first sample application running live. 

This is a good whitepaper that addresses some of the challenges of interoperability within government.  Interrop in this context includes delivering services to citizens and sharing services between government agencies.  

On Monday I passed my last test for MCSD - 70-315 Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual C# .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET.  These tests are almost as much about your test taking skills as they are about your knowledge of the subject.  About a month ago I went in, thinking that I was taking the Web Applications exam (ASP.NET) instead I had accidently selected the wrong test.  I had signed up for the Win Applications exam (WinForms).  I have written hello-world and not much more with WinForms.  But somehow I passed it.  I know some really bright people who have troubles with these tests.  I also know people that can pass tests but that I would never let them touch my compiler.  Well at least my certifications are current now, so that I don't have to deal with this process for the next couple of years. 

I'm reading Fritz Onion's book - Essential ASP.NET.  The book is terrific.  It is probably the last ASP.NET book that I will ever buy.  This book explains behind the scenes details that are not shown elsewhere.  It is also well organized and well written. 

I passed the 70-300 Exam - Solution Architecture.  The exam is too easy.  Without giving away details about the test, just trust me that it is little more than a reading comprehension test. All MCS Consultants are required to take these tests.  I pulled my "transcript" the other day.  It showed that I have taken (passed) 26 exams in my 9 years with MCS. I have noticed that there does not seem to be many developers who take certs seriously anymore.  At one time partners paid their consultants bonuses for passing exams and getting certified.  But anymore, I rarely meet customers or partner developers who bother taking the exams.  Another indicator of their popularity are by looking at resumes and devs that we interview.  I rarely see MCSD/MCAD on resumes.  Is it just my skewed view of the world - are the MCSD/MCAD on the decline?  I have one more test - C# Web Forms.  I'm taking it on Monday.  This should be my last exam for another few years when the rewrite the tests again. 

WRT interoperability between data and systems, perhaps the government gets it, and we in the technology industry haven't figured it out yet? I read an interesting paper yesterday IAC Interoperability Strategy.  The report was forwarded to me by one of it's authors, and one of the most visionary technical people that I have met in government, Eliot Christian.  Eliot is heavily involved in many standards groups, including OASIS and W3C.  The intersting idea in the paper is that interop comes from 3 ideas: Common Syntax - Structure of the message ( ex. XML, ASN-1). Common Mechanism - The protocol and message definition (ex. SOAP, WSDL) Common Semantics - The agreed upon meaning of the messages. The technical community including Microsoft, IBM, and everyone else are focused heavily on the first two items on the list.  But it is this third item, common semantics that is the real challenge to building interroperable systems. What are Semantics? The paper uses the example of salary.  For two systems to share salary information, they have to agree on definition like "gross annual compensation including bonuses and other compensation in 2003 US dollars".  Even if both systems use the same message structure if they don't both have the same definition, then interoperability is impossible.  There are some standard definitions that are defined by "Dublin Core" and "ISO 11179".  While these standards are important, they need to become part of the mainstream thinking with the technology providers and customers.  My hope is that once the technology companies finish up with XML and Web services, that we can build tools and solutions to help customers address the Common Semantics problem.  

It has been several weeks since I have written anything in my BLOG.  Since then I've had an interesting trip to NYC to visit the counter-terrorism center.  During the 9-5 I've been mostly writing a marketing/vision document.  All very mundane stuff.  But at night I'm playing Battlefield 1942.  It is by far the best computer game that I have played.  The game recreates famous WWII battles.  In it you are a soldier on either the Allied or Axis side.  You can drive tanks, fire artillery, drive subs, airplanes, or be a foot soldier, sniper etc.  Although you can play standalone, the game is meant to be played online.  Typically 30-50 people play at once.  Last night I fought on the German side of Omaha Beach and we won.  These games are a huge waste of time, but they are addictive.

The most fun that I had today was playing with the Microsoft Speech SDK v 5.1 for Windows - not to be confused with the Microsoft .NET Speech SDK Beta 2.  Of course I WAS confused for aa short while because I didn't realize at first that these are completely different.  I had assumed that the .NET version was a complete super set of v 5.1. WRONG! We have a customer who wants to full text search audio and video files.  The Speech SDK v 5.1 has a few very cool sample applications for speech recognition.  What I am looking into is how to pass it an audio stream instead of using the Microphone.  Also eventually we will have to write an IFilter so that the index or SPS search engine can search the content.  And I will have to figure out how to link the audio text back into the stream, so that you could jump from your search results back to the "hit" in the audio or video file instead of always starting from the beginning.  I believe that there is a standard for linking media togeather in this way (but I don't remember the name of the standard).  This may turn into a huge project unless we can find someone else who has done this already either commercial product or sample code. I'm off to NYC for a couple of days to meet with NYPD-CT.  It should be very interesting two days.  BTW, the NYPD Counter Terrorism group was on 60 Minutes on Sunday night.    Go Terps!   

On Friday I finished my week long Developmentor Essential.NET class.  I played with the WS-Security and WS-Attachements (DIME) capabilities in the WSE.  Today we had VTC with Juval Lowy .  Juval showed how to use object context and intercept calls to and from an object.  This is similar in some ways to COM context, but gives you a way to add your own items and processing to the object context.  His example solution provides a logging solution that will log all componet calls and errors.  To enable it, you simply add a [Logging] attribute to your class declaration.  It is interesting that this whole approach is mostly undocumented.  Kudos to Juval for unraveling it all and producing a very useful solution.  He has an article about how to do this in the March MSDN magazine.  Also in the March MSDN notice that Tim Ewald has a very interesting article outlining doing something similar but for web services.  Thus there are two interesting approaches for extending component services: for Web Services - Soap Extensions and for .NET Components - Context Interception.  Each approach enables us to decouple business logic from plumbing. BTW, it turns out that if you dig into WSE you will see that it is uses soap extensions.  The more that I learn about .NET Remoting and the .NET web services implementations, the more interesting it becomes, but also the more perplexing it all is.  It is certainly true that web services is still evolving and probably isn't complete enough to be used as the primary technology for large distributed apps.