This past week I've been in Orlando, Florida attending the Microsoft Convergence 2008 conference.  This marks my fourth such conference and they keep getting better and better!  My primary responsibilities at this conference (and the MS Partner Conference for that matter) revolve around the booth that we have in the Expo hall.  Five of my team and co-workers were in attendance, manning the booth (Christian, Jeff, Gwyn, David, and myself) as well as an associate, Scott.  It was a good thing all five of us were there because we hardly had a moment to breathe what with the traffic our booth brought in.  It was awesome.

Not only was the week full of activity in the conference proper, we had the opportunity to witness the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch on Monday evening/Tuesday morning, hang out with partners and customers, and all-in-all have a great time.  We keep hearing how much our customers and partners LOVE our product; that sure makes a developer such as myself feel even better about what I do.

I already look forward to the next conference.

I had the opportunity this past Friday (Oct 12th, 2007) to go to Seattle to represent Experlogix in the CRM 4.0 Partner Readiness Event.  We (Experlogix) and Scribe Software are the two sponsors that are participating in this event as it occurs across the United States over the next several weeks, so it's very exciting to be participating in this exclusive event.

As Experlogix is a sponsor of the event, I had the opportunity during the lunch break provide a 20 minute presentation on Experlogix and the web-based product Configurator.  I was very pleased with how smoothly everything went; it was great!  We got excellent feedback for the demonstration and a lot of interest.

It was a bit of a whirlwind trip for me as I flew in in the morning, talked to some MS partners, shared my demonstration/presentation, and flew out in the afternoon.  I have the opportunity again to represent Experlogix on Nov 1st in Denver for a similar event.  I'm really looking forward to it.

I recently had the responsibility of moving an existing, in-use Microsoft CRM 3.0 database from it's current location/domain to an entirely new server on a different domain.  Not only was the target domain different but so was the licensing in that we were upgrading our product code and not using a Small Business Server license anymore.  Oh, and I should also mention that the organization name was also changing within the database.

This process is pretty painless, all-in-all, provided you're careful and pay attention to the goings-on of the process.

First of all, I backed-up the SQL Server databases (company_METABASE and company_MSCRM), archived them, and restored them into the new domain.  I also took the time to remove any schemas and logins from the databases that didn't apply in the new domain.

Then, I followed the instruction as provided by the Microsoft CRM Redeployment Tool (thankfully this existed to facilitate this process) on the CRM 3.0 disc 1 (also available via download here) to map users from the old system into the new domain.

When it came time to associate the new CRM installation with the original databases, however, I received the following error "The existing databases are not compatible with this installation of Microsoft CRM".  This was easily fixed by following the recommendations in a KB article and doing some spelunking on my own.  As it turns out, it wasn't liking the new databases because of an organization name change in CRM.  I also received an error because of the license key because we were moving off of the Small Business Server to another non-Small Business Server and the license keys could not be used together.

The following SQL commands fixed the issues:

UPDATE BuildVersion SET Revision = X (where X == the 3.0.5400.X of the SetupServer.exe product version)
UPDATE OrganizationBase SET Name = 'new organization name'
DELETE FROM License

After that, the installation was smooth as glass and without a hitch.

One thing of note as well once we were up and running.  CRM was operating correctly, but anytime we'd access the Reports section, we were greeted with the error "Report.config has invalid schema, and could not be loaded".  Likewise, when we'd go into the Calendar section we'd get an "Unexpected Error".

The fix for these were to make sure that the CRM 3.0 website and the SQL Reporting Services virtual directories were using the proper ASP.NET Version (1.1.4322).

Wow! What a week!

It's been an exciting time of late.  Not only were many things accomplished (and a few plaguing bugs resolved), but I found out Friday (yesterday to me still despite it now being Sunday) that I'd be leaving for the Netherlands (a.k.a. Holland, despite Holland being a pair of provinces of the country) on Saturday for the week.  Well, I'm here now in the town of Eindhoven.  And it's beautiful, though overcast.  I've not been in town but a few minutes so I've not had a chance to get out, but here's a quick photo from my hotel room.

I left Salt Lake at 1:30 PM, arrived in Houston and departed there at 7:10 PM to arrive in Amsterdam at 12:30 PM.  It was so nice to fly business class where I could fully recline the seat, watch movies, have great food, and all-in-all have a great flight.  Then, upon arriving I grabbed the train in the airport to Eindhoven (which was about a 1 hr 20 min ride).  The hotel is only a few blocks from the train station so the walk was nice.

I'll be here all week and I'm looking forward to a great time.

This past week was a very quiet one on the blog-front as I was full-time engaged in Denver for an in behalf of Experlogix.  This was my fourth Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference and it was fantastic.  Since 2004, the WPC's that I've attendend have been in Toronto, Minneapolis, Boston, and this past week in Denver.

We had the great opportunity to have our expo hall booth situated adjacent to the Microsoft booths which was ideal for funneling traffic our way.

It is wonderful to be associated with such an awesome company and work with great people.  I love what I do!

I had the fortune (or misfortune depending on how you look at it) of completely rebuilding my development machine from scratch last week.  The unfortunate circumstance of having a corrupted registry and destroyed network settings befell my laptop due to a bad install of a VPN client.  I was able to rescue 100% of my data however, off-loading it to an external USB drive which I love.  I've long been wanting to make the move to Windows Vista but for a grundle of reasons couldn't validate the time it would take to move to the new environment.  Perhaps this was the kick in the pants that I needed.

Once I blew the machine away (paved it, as they say) I set forth to install Windows Vista Ultimate on my Dell Precision M90.  The install went extremely smoothly - I had an operating machine in about 30-45 minutes.  With the exception of the built-in laptop monitor, I was very pleased that the OS correctly identified 100% of my devices.  It was peculiar that Vista insisted in setting the display rotated 90° counter-clockwise after a few reboots.  Until I installed the correct drivers I couldn't shake it of this habit.  Also, it's working great with my secondary Dell 2407WFP monitor   Dual 1920x1200 resolution

I've also installed my customary applications (Office 2007, VS Team Suite 2005 SP1 w/Vista Patch, XML MissionKit, SQL Server Express 2005 SP2 (I decided to use SQL Express rather than the full blown SQL Server AND Express for development purposes - it's proving to be perfect), Photoshop CS2, WinRar 3.7 (you'll need 3.7 for better Vista integration), Resharper, Invirtus VM Optimizer, et al).  Much of my development also requires VS2003 (.NET 1.1) which is not supported by MS on Vista.  I've therefore established a Virtual PC running XP SP2 as my primary .NET 1.1 dev platform and it's working great.  I have it open and running all day long with ne'er a hiccup.

All in all I can say that I'm very pleased with the upgrade and it wasn't the least bit painful.  Also, I can honestly say that I enjoy using Vista as a non-administrator (something I had been doing religiously for about 2 years on XP).  The periodic UAC warnings aren't the nuisance everyone seems to think they are.

That said, it is important to recognize when things are running under admin privileges and when they're not.  For instance, if an application launches following the install, chances are it's running under admin privileges so any settings made aren't going to be for the logged-on user but rather for the administrative account.

I'm loving developing on Vista - it's awesome!

I've been out of contact on my blog for several days now because I was in San Diego for Convergence 2007 with Experlogix.  This year we were a bronze sponsor for the event which, among other things, provided us with a 20'x10' booth and let me tell you, it was well worth it.  What a great event!

I've enjoyed the Convergence conferences the past two years for many reasons, but this one has, by far, been the best event for us.  Experlogix was well represented with 5 of our staff members in the expo hall booth at all times and we didn't even have but a moments rest.  Interacting with partners and customers is a great joy (despite the fact that it's also exhausting).  We unveiled our product configurator for GP 9.0 at this event as well as our latest version (with offline sync) for the CRM 3.0 family.

One of the most rewarding aspects of working on a product and interfacing with customers is when you see and hear how much they enjoy using the product.  It just doesn't get any better than that.

I can't wait until next year's Convergence in Orlando; but there still remains the Partner Conference in Denver in July and (fingers crossed) the Convergence in Copenhagen.  I don't think we're going to that one, but that would be a blast!

One of the most satisfying and gratifying aspects of writing software is to hear how much it helps customers succeed.  One such review was posted yesterday by John O'Connor.  He has some great things to say and gives nice succinct overview of what our product configurator is.

Reading his review makes me want to continue to strive to make our product even better and to further improve our great support team.  This is what I get up for in the morning! :)