Add Silverlight to an entity form Navigation Menu.

...another way to get advantage of the power of Silverlight within Crm 2011 is to use the whole entity form real estate. We can do this by adding a navigation item to an existing group. The navigation area is divided into five areas: Common, Sales, Service, Marketing and for entities that support them, Processes, We can either use the form editor using drag and drop to change their vertical position, add new items, move existing items to another area or use the "FormXml" element (I will talk about how to customise the FormXml element in another post) to achieve the same result.

N.B. "In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 , the ability to add navigation items to the entity form has been moved from ISV.Config to the <FormXml> (FormXML) element for each entity form. During upgrade from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0, any entity form navigation customizations in the ISV.Config are moved to the definition of the main form for that entity."

So, let's see how we can customise an entity navigation form; first of all we are going to add a new navigation item to an existing area (it is not possible to add a new area). Open an entity record select the Customize tab and click on "Form",

this will open the form editor, at this point click on "Navigation" select the area on the navigation menu that you want to customise,

select the "Insert" tab,

and click the Navigation Link button,

Select a name, look up for an icon and the HTML web resource that hosts your Silverlight application that you have previously added.

And here is the final result.

Hope you enjoyed. :)

How to create Silverlight Web Resources

In this article I will talk about how to create a Silverlight application and add it as a Web Resource in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, and then embed it in an entity form.
First of all create a new Silverlight 4 project in Visual Studio:

Creating a Silverlight web resource is nothing different from creating any other web resource in CRM 2011, it is just a matter of creating the application,as we did above, creating  new web resource as shown below, giving a name, a display name, type and uploading the file (xap).

After having created the web resource we will need to add it to an entity form, in my case the entity is an opportunity. Open an opportunity select the customize tab and then click on Form, add a Tab by choosing the Insert tab as shown below, add a web resource and check the "Pass record object-type code and unique identifier as parameter"(see this post).

Save publish and reload the opportunity entity, you should be able to see your Silverlight applicaiton inside the newly created tab.
This is how my Silverlight application looks like inside a form entity.