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 display a Silverlight application in the home page grid.

Hi everyone, in this post I am going to show how to display a Silverlight application in the main page grid by customising the navigation pane site map.
First of all add the site map to an unmanaged solution and export the solution, open the customizations.xml file in Visual Studio, associate it with the customizationSolution.xsd located in the SDK\Schemas folder in the SDK download package. To associate the customizations.xml file with the xsd file: in Visual studio press F4, this will show the property pane, click on schemas then "...", click add..., navigate to the folder select the file and click OK.

In order to be able to show a Silverlight application in the main page grid we need to create a web resources for both the Silverlight xap application and the HTML web page that hosts the Silverlight app (chek this post on how to create a Silverlight web resource) then reference the web page from the site map with the "$webresource:" directive see example below.


These few lines of code add a new group within the Workplace area and a new sub area within the group.

And this is the result, hope this helps someone.

HAPPY EASTER!!!