Last week, I had the privilege of being a Solution Advisor for Microsoft’s 2nd Dynamics CRM Incubation Week in Boston.  For those not familiar with this event, it is a week where Microsoft invites a few startups to a Microsoft Technology Center to meet with marketing experts, venture capitalists and top technical talent to help rapidly “spark" a new business venture.  The event also introduces these startups to BizSpark, which is a awesome licensing program Microsoft provides for startups.

I will say, if a friend of mine was starting a new technology product venture tomorrow, I would hope Microsoft would have a 3rd Incubation Week and he/she would be lucky enough to get in it and I would tell them to signup for BizSpark.

Here I am with the team (Send from the left):

During the week, I was partnered with Hippamatic from Texas that is working on a mobile radiology solution built on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM (xRM) platform.  The solution combined Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Windows Mobile 6.1, SilverLight, WCF and more.

For the demo, I built a SilverLight Image Viewer Control that binds to Microsoft Dynamics CRM attachments.  It’s pretty cool, the control also makes uses of custom shaders to provide brightness, contrast and negative manipulation.  I will post a full summary of the control and how I bound it to CRM in a later post this week.  Here is a preview:

The left is a standard ASP.NET page rendering data from CRM.  The “Images” list on the left queries the “X-Ray Order” entity and lists all attachments of type JPG.  Clicking on an image fires a JavaScript event that tells the SilverLight control on the right to make a web service call to the “portal”.  The portal then proxies the request to CRM’s web services to download the image.  The control then lets users pay with the brightness, contracts and negative via a custom SilverLight 3.0 Image Effect Shader.

More on Incubation Week can be found on Sanjay’s blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/SanjayJain/

Cheers,

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