Dynamics CRM 4.0 Prototyping with Expressions Blend 4 – Sketchflow

Paul Nieuwelaar, 16 August 2010

Often in Microsoft Dynamics CRM when you are customizing an entity for someone, usually the only information you have to go off is someone else trying to explain to you what they want, and how it should be, or some loose sketches on paper of what the entity should look like.

Most of the time you will do it as best as you think it should look, which may take a long time, and then find out that it is not what they wanted at all, and have to redo it, which can be very time consuming for a developer.

Instead of performing the customization straight into Dynamics CRM, and having to make changes every time something is not right, in the past what we have done is used our Visio Stencils to design the entities in Visio, but what you can also do is create a prototype of the entity in Expressions Blend Sketchflow, to look exactly as the entity would look in Dynamics CRM. This way you can interact with entity as you would with the real thing, and if something wasn’t quite right, and needed to be changed, it could easily be done in Blend.

In the image below you can see I have created an Account entity, and made some customizations.

Once you have created the entity yourself, you can save it as a template for future use.

You can create a new Sketchflow application by clicking File, New Project, and selecting ‘Silverlight Sketchflow Application’. Give it a name and click ‘Ok’.

Next to find the sketch controls click on the ‘Assets’ tab, expand ‘Sketchflow’, expand ‘Styles’ and select ‘Sketch Styles’. In this view you will have a list of all the available Sketchflow tools, such as ‘TextBox-Sketch’, which would represent a text field in Dynamics CRM. It also contains other built in tools that relate to Dynamics CRM such as radio buttons, pick lists, tabs, scroll bars, and buttons. These tools can all be dragged and dropped onto the page, and positioned and resized easily where ever you want.

Pretty soon you can have a whole sketch entity created from within Blend. Once you are finished modifying the entity in Blend, or if you just want to preview what you have got, you can run the application by clicking ‘Project’, ‘Run Project’, or by clicking Ctrl + F5.

An internet window will open up, and will load the Sketchflow application if you have the Silverlight plugin installed, if you don’t you can simply follow the install instructions. Once the application has loaded in your browser you will be able to enter text into the text fields, select radio buttons and drop downs, just like you would if you were viewing it in Dynamics CRM. This way the entity can be previewed in the browser using Sketchflow, and if anything needs to be changed, you can easily modify it in Blend. Then when it is finalized you will only need to perform the customization in Dynamics CRM once.

Click here to view an example of a customized Dynamics CRM entity designed in Expressions Blend 4
NOTE: You will need the Silverlight plugin installed to view it.