Balendran's Blogs

  As a hands on Development Manager I often get to lead by example, in my latest attempt to fast track re-development of some of our Java based web services to ASP.NET web service, I went about this using XRM based early bind method. I also explored SDK and JavaScript to execute the Dynamics rest API. For a starter our web service methods roll up large datasets therefore JSON based service was obviously not suitable. Also the java based services made calls to multiple stored procedures through Hibernate frame work, the idea was to convert any calls to Dynamics CRM using XRM with LINQ and other bits and pieces using NHibernate framework. I am keen to learn alternative methods and very open for feedback on the approach I have taken here. Without further ado here are the steps.   1. Re-Compile XRM to include proxies for Dynamics CRM customisations. This was easily done by executing the following commands within the CrmSvcUtil.cmd file REM $0\..\..\Microsoft.Xrm\bin\CrmSvcU...

  Scenario: When the user hits a list item within the Android ListView control we would like to open a document in this case its a .pdf document from one of our web sites. The website expects a parameter and serves a pdf, matching the parameter in the request. When a file is not available we get a standard 404. There are times when you just cannot rely on the browser available on Android handsets to open documents for various reasons, one being you want to pop specific error messages on the screen ie document ‘NAME’ is not available yet and some reasons. Our users did not like the passing the control to the browser from the Android application and then reopen the application to get back to where you were.   Solution Discussion One of the possible solution is to stream the file and write it to and disk and create an activity to open the file on a pdf reader application. PDF readers are shipped with Android which made our lives a lot easier. The small minority who did not ...

  Microsoft Dynamics Customer Portal 2011 is packaged and targeted heavily at CRM online customers and the documentation encourages customers to use windows live as authentication provider. If you have an existing investment in an alternative authentication provider or an Open source Single Sign On framework, you may want to make use of your exiting Authentication framework. Also for your local development you might like to use Active Directory or an SQL membership provider Database instead of completing the long and complicated windows live set up. You can go about this by following the blog of Shan McArthur on MS Dynamics Customer Portal changes . In this blog I will attempt to describe the steps and the code changes to Customer Portal 2011 to integrate JASIG CAS SSO . The version of CAS being used as part of this demonstration is 3.4.7 and should work with any other version and the CAS server is deployed on a Tomcat 7 Server. 1. CAS Client Configuration 1. To get started, d...