One of my applications on the marketplace is the countdown tile application. This is a simple application that when pinned to the home screen lets you see a countdown of the number of days until a certain date.

This application has recorded 6299 unique users to date. It’s had a mixed bag as far as reviews is concerned but this is mainly down to the fact that the tile update isn’t the most reliable mechanism on the phone system (something for another blog post to come soon).

One feature that people ask for is the ability to use their own pictures in the background of the tile. This is something that I have been aiming to do for a ‘Pro’ version of the application to try and convert some of the 6K users into 75p purchasers

With this and the fact that some of the new updates to the live tile services within the Mango platform update that is coming has prompted me to create a control that lets user be a little more creative with the tile that they would like to create.

I am in the early stages of putting together a Tile Maker control that presents the user with an area the size of a standard live tile. Behind this area can be placed an image that the user wants to use within the tile. This image can be moved around by using multi-touch gestures. Once the user has the image in the desired place they can then take a snapshot of the tile area to use as the live tile.

If this control interests you you can download the current Alpha code from codeplex at this link:

http://wptilemaker.codeplex.com/

Let me know what you think and if you will find this control useful. Also if you can think of any additional features then pop them in a comment on this post.

And you have just read that the Pano Pivot and Bing maps controls are finally being released too.

And now your thinking ‘I can’t wait till then’. Well here is what to do.

Well for Pano and Pivot use this codeplex project: http://phone.codeplex.com/

For the Bing maps follow this post: http://www.silverlighthack.com/post/2010/03/21/Using-the-Silverlight-Bing-Maps-control-on-the-Windows-Phone-7.aspx

I can tell you with great confidence that these things work well with the tools beta as Sequence has compiled an app that is functionally rich and runs without glitch. So don’t skimp on functionality because you don’t have what we have been promised.

I am glad that we haven’t taken a different approach for our UI and am really looking forward to getting my hands on the final version.

Just make sure you allow yourself half a day to move your code into the official controls. I get a feeling that it’s not going to be hard to move but it may be fiddly.

On another note how cool is it that 300K copies of the tools have been downloaded. People really are going to have to make sure their App shines above the rest to make money. The game is on peeps lets make the new WP7 platform a big success.

29/72010: Sorry but I am going to be dropping this series because my software focus has change to developing Windows Phone 7 applications. Maybe re visit this in the future (hopefully before CRM 5 is released

Hi, this is part 1 of a series of posts giving an introduction to extending Microsoft Dynamics using Silverlight.

In this post I will outline how to add a custom Silverlight control to any of the entity forms.

For these articles I will be using Visual Studio 2010 Professional with All of the usual Silverlight (version 4) tools installed.

At Sequence the company where I work we make use of the eService accelerator this allows our customers to log cases via an extension to our web site.  For this series of posts I am going to create a new tab in the contact entity screen that will display details of the contacts log in details that are stored in a separate ASP.NET authentication database.

How it works

The CRM 4 entity forms allow administrators to customise forms in many different ways but the one way that makes things handy for us is the ability to add IFRAME elements into a form. We will use this customisation to display a Silverlight control inside the form.

 

 

Getting Started

Create a new Silverlight application as normal ensuring that you enable RIA services and create a test web project.

NOTE: In future when you will want to make this live you will need a server available that you can add the .Net framework 4 and host the web site or virtual directory.

Identifying the Entity

So that the Silverlight application knows what entity it is using it will need to be passed the Id of the entity that is being displayed in the entity form. To ensure that this works when you add an IFRAME customisation to an entity you will need to ensure that the I frame is passed the record ID and type:

This results in the following URL:

http://localhost:40363/ContactDashboard.aspx?type=2&typename=contact&id={299390EB-049E-DE11-A280-00155D801211}&orgname=Sequence&userlcid=1033&orglcid=1033

To get these values into my Silverlight application I have decided to use Silverlight parameters. To do this I first added the following code to the ASPX page that displays the application:

public string SilverlightParams

{

    get

    {

string sRes = string.Format("id={0},type={1},orgname={2},typename={3}",

            Request["id"], Request["type"], Request["orgname"], Request["typename"]);

   return sRes;

    }

}

Then in the page mark-up I added the following to the params for the Silverlight application:

<param name="initParams" value="<% = SilverlightParams %>" />

So we get this:

<object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2"

   width="100%" height="100%">

    <param name="source"   

      value="ClientBin/Sequence.CRM.SilverlightExtensions.MainDashboard.xap"/>

    <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" />

    <param name="background" value="white" />

    <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50303.0" />

    <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />

    <param name="initParams" value="<% = SilverlightParams %>" />

    <a href=http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50303.0

        style="text-decoration:none">

   <img src=http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376

       alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/>

    </a>

</object><iframe id="_sl_historyFrame" style="visibility:hidden;height:0px;width:0px;border:0px"></iframe></div>

Making the App Know the entity Id

In the Silverlight application project I added the following to the App class code:

 

private Guid? m_ContactID = null;

 

public Guid? ContactID

{

 

    get

    {

 

        return m_ContactID;

    }

}

In the Application_Startup method:

 

private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)

{

 

    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(e.InitParams["id"]))

        m_ContactID =

new Guid(e.InitParams["id"]);

 

   

    this.RootVisual = new MainPage();

}

We can now access the ContactID anywhere in the code like this:

((

App)App.Current).ContactID

 

Just checking

Here is a screenshot of a simple app in an I frame just to show it works:

In part 2 I will show how to hook this app up to the ASP.NET authentication database.

 

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Tomorrow we see the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight V4.

I for one can’t wait as it will give me loads to blog about!