Ben H Blog - Keep it Simple, Then Refactor.

Many of the ‘line of business’ applications today are starting to expose their core framework as a development platform.  MS CRM is a great example of this.  It’s a great CRM solution, but it can also be extended and used to solve countless other line of business needs.  For more information on MS CRM check out David Yack’s CRM blog or the MS CRM site.

Salesforce.com is jumping on this bandwagon but is also adding an interesting twist.  They are selling their development framework as a service.  It’s also interesting that they are introducing a $0.99 per login option.  You can find some details about this announcement here and get more information on the Salesforce site.  MS CRM has a similar option called MS CRM Live that includes a subset of the extensibility features and is hosted by Microsoft.  You can read more about MS CRM deployment options here.

Looks like these two products are going to battle it out in this space.

Scott Guthrie does a great job of describing how to get and install this here.  Take the 5 minutes to do it.  It’s worth it.

I just got the opportunity to do a talk on LINQ at the Colorado Springs SQL Server User Group tomorrow night January 16^th.  The meeting starts at 5:30.  I’m going to add some content that is more SQL Server related and try to inform everyone what LINQ means to the SQL DBA community.

For more info please vist the Colorado Springs SQL Server User Group site.

Hope to see you there.

OK, this sounds like a no brainer, but I ran into an issue the other day and it took me forever to find the information needed.  I used the GUI in VS 2008 to create some strongly typed application settings.  This is easy to do.  Right click on the project and select Properties.

I created two settings: one is a DateTime and the other is a bool.  This is the easy part.  The hard part is getting and saving these settings in code.  Well, it’s not hard once you know what you are looking for.  I searched far and wide using ‘Application Settings’ and C#.  I found all kinds of document ion about the Mysettings namespace in VB.Net but nothing on C#.  I even scoured the documentation from MSDN.  I finally found an answer on a forum somewhere.  You use the ‘Properties.Settings.Default’ namespace.  So, I can access my settings using this code.

If nothing else just remember this post for future reference in case you run across this yourself.  For some reason the ‘Properties’ namespace just isn’t intuitive to me.  There is also a lot of confusion out there revolving around the difference between ‘Properties.Settings.Default’ and the ‘System.Configuration.AppSettingsSection’ namespaces. One of the reason I’m blogging on it is so I can reference it the next time I run into this.