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Just recently I was tasked with seeing if we could provide a way to access our Dynamics CRM instance via OData. My initial investigations made it seem like there was nothing for me to do; CRM 2011 provides OData support out of the box. Small problem. We were running CRM 4.0.
Simplicity appeals to me. It always has. Something that is simple is straightforward to comprehend and is consequently easy to use. It's clarity.
I've written a subsequent post which builds on the work of this original post. The new post exposes this functionality via a WCF service and can be found here.
I wanted to talk about an approach I've discovered for making PDFs directly from HTML. I realise that in these wild and crazy days of PDF.js and the like that techniques like this must seem very old hat. That said, this technique works and more importantly it solves a problem I was faced with but without forcing the users to move the "newest hottest version of X". Much as many of would love to solve problems this way, alas many corporations move slower than that and in the meantime we still have to deliver - we still have to meet requirements. Rather than just say "I did this" I thought I'd record how I got to this point in the first place. I don't know about you but I find the reasoning behind why different technical decisions get made quite an interesting topic...
So it's 2010 and I've started using jQuery. jQuery is a JavaScript library. This means that I'm writing JavaScript... Gulp! I should say that at this point in time I hated JavaScript (I have mentioned this previously). But what I know now is that I barely understood the language at all. All the JavaScript I knew was the result of copying and pasting after I'd hit "view source". I don't feel too bad about this - not because my ignorance was laudable but because I certainly wasn't alone in this. It seems that up until recently hardly anyone knew anything about JavaScript. It puzzles me now that I thought this was okay. I suppose like many people I didn't think JavaScript was capable of much and hence felt time spent researching it would be wasted. Just to illustrate where I was then, here is 2009 John's idea of some pretty "advanced" JavaScript: