I had the opportunity of giving a demonstration during Andrew Bybee's PDC session on building line of business applications.  I found it a little intimidating to follow Andy as he is an excellent speaker and really brings a lot of energy and passion to the audience.

Andy delivered an excellent presentation on how to use CRM for building line-of-business (LOB)applications on the CRM platform.  His main theme was to think of the CRM as XRM and not constrain yourself to only thinking about the typical CRM applications such as sales force automation.  He demonstrated how the CRM fits well into a model-driven development model. Andy used a recruiting system to demonstrate the values of CRM in putting together a solution to implement a recruiting process.  Andy highlighted the CRM framework components that add significant value to a LOB application, including workflow, security, reporting, customization, and more.  The developer is able to focus on the core requirements of their application while leveraging the CRM framework values with very little effort.

Nirav Shah teased the audience by showing them some of the CRM 5 features that add new value to LOB applications.  Nirav showed some of the improvements in the area of custom business logic, including the new code sandbox, transaction support in plugins, and integration with the .NET Service Bus.  He also talked about the new "Solutions" model in CRM 5 that helps encapsulate and manage deployment of CRM customizations.  It didn't take Nirav long to get down into code to satisfy the curiosities of the developers in the audience.  He demonstrated the new isolatable plugin for implementing business logic in the recruitment scenario.  He also demonstrated what happens with a 'bad' plugin, where you can see improved trace information for plugin events in the error screens, and see how the CRM platform disabled the plugin that was repeatedly failing.  He also talked about the new transaction model implemented in the CRM 5 plugin model.

My demonstration focused on the values of service composition.  The website that I was demonstrating was an online conference site using the ADXSTUDIO CMS, hosted in Windows Azure, using SQL Data Services, ezGDS services for travel booking, and CRM Online for conference and travel registrations, and using Live ID for authentication.  I gave a perspective of an ISV and how the new Microsoft cloud services and CRM platform are excellent candidates to use in putting together a comprehensive solution composed of various different services that can all be tied together.  I also broke into code to demonstrate how easy it is to develop against the CRM using the ADXSTUDIO CRM Developer Toolkit, which works exclusively with Dynamics CRM in all deployment models (on-prem, partner hosted, and Online).

Special thanks should be given to Ben Riga and Girish Raja for their encouragement, support, and contributions for the conference demonstration.  The demonstration was put together in less than a month on pre-PDC CTP bits of Azure and it would not have been possible without their help.