Cathy Hardman's Blog

CRM Custom Web Page

This post is for those of you that are starting to build custom web pages for integration with CRM.  I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why one of my pages ran very well outside of CRM, but when I ran it under the CRM service it started acting very strange.  At first I thought it might be due to the ajax that I had on the page, which it wasn't, but that reminds me to tell you that if you use ajax, or other script on the page, you need to set the property to allow scripts to run when you setup the iframe in crm to run the page in. Anyway, my flakey page problem was very simple, even though it took me a while to find it.  The CRM site was not configured for ViewState.  I enabled the view state at the page level on my page and all is good again. :)

XmlTextWriter Formating

I was recent faced with writing code to generate an xml file to be sent to an other company that automaticly processes it.  No big deal, I thought, just use the XmlTextWriter, flip through my data and generate the file.  All well and good.  Then the other company came back and said they couldn't handle the xml being all on one line, they needed a new line for each tag.  So after a bit of research I found that the XmlTextWriter has some formatting properties that can be used to create indenting, new lines and such.  The code I used is this.

            //initialize the Xml Text Writer
            XmlOutput = new XmlTextWriter(m_memStream, Encoding.UTF8);
            XmlOutput.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
            XmlOutput.Indentation = 0;
            XmlOutput.IndentChar = '\n';

The one thing I want to note is that in the examples I saw, the Indentation property was used to say how many IndentChar that you want, for example, 5 spaces.  So, I set this to 1 thinking that I would get one new line character, but for some reason, I got 3 or 4 new lines.  Moral of the story is, if you are using the Indentation format for the XmlTextWriter and you are trying to get a new line, set the Indentaion property to zero.

VS 2008 Beta 2 and Ajax 1.0 - Workaround

While using the VS 2008 Beta 2 Multitargeting support feature to develope websites targeting the 3.0 framework, I ran into a problem with Ajax 1.0 and the AjaxControlToolkit.  When trying to add a refernce to the AjaxControlToolkit, I got an error message that stated the framework version required by the assembly or one of it's dependencies was higher then the project target framework version.  After some research, I found a blog with a workaround for the problem.  I have posted the link below.  Make sure to read the side affects to the work around before using it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2007/07/30/using-vs-2008-to-target-asp-net-ajax-1-0.aspx

.Net Framework 3.5 and AjaxControlToolkit

After recently converting a web app to the 3.5 framework, I found that the pages that used the AjaxControlToolkit no longer worked.  With a little research, I found that there is a new release of the toolkit that needs to be used with 3.5 apps.  You can download the assembly by going to the following web page and selecting the link that reads "AjaxControlToolkit-Framework3.5.zip". Happy coding :)

http://www.codeplex.com/AtlasControlToolkit/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4923

Ajax History Control

Hey All,  I just ran across an ajax control I hadn't seen before.  It's a history control.  The basics of it is that you use it to track steps made in the progression of a page with partial postbacks.  Like paging in a grid for example.  Then the control allows you to logicly go back a step in the partial postbacks when the user presses the back button.  Sounds cool, can't wait to try it.  Here is the url for the rest of you to give it a gander.  http://asp.net/learn/ajax-videos/video-149.aspx

Dynamic CRM and DateTime

I recently ran into an issue with datetime conversion not being what I expected when copying data from one CRM entity to another.  I found the issues had to do with converting the datetime to universal datetime.  To find out more here is an excelent MS blog post. http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2007/05/22/date-time-values-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm.aspx

RSS Feed Consumption (and Publishing)

I recently coded a control to consume and display rss and atom feeds and I was introduced to a library that makes this much easier.  It also has classes to help with publishing feeds.  Here is the location for the download in case it will make someones life a bit easier as it did mine.

http://www.codeplex.com/ASPNETRSSToolkit