Benjamin Autin

I’ve finally had a legitimate reason to mess around with Microsoft CRM 4.0′s Custom Workflow Activities.

CRM’s packaged Workflow Activities let you do a good number of things right off. Create and modify entities, send emails, reassign entities, etc. However, as always, there are times when you want to do more than what the packaged set lets you do. Thanks to CRM’s plugin architecture and the SDK everything is possible. The plugin architecture also allows you to access the SDK within the context of the user who accessed or triggered the plugin.

Combined with the CRM Email Router, I was able to knock together a quick proof of concept that creates a new entity based on an email received. Eventually, it will be fleshed out to parse the email and fill in the created entity with relevant data.

I wish I could be further along than I currently am.

I’ve gotten the aiming reticules to show up and hit the proper area, roughly. Sometimes, they’ll embed into the object, rather than coast along the side, but it’s good enough for right now. This also caused me to implement a rough level format, which then cascaded into redoing the entire gravity system. The level is hard-coded into the game at the moment, but that will obviously have to change later.

I’ve been having a couple of problems along the home front, not to mention the Cisco QoS test I need to study for and schedule to take. All of my chores are making it a bit difficult to get to making this game. I’ll pull through however.

Instead of trying to further modify my own personal posting platform, I just downloaded and configured WordPress. I’ll be adding pages and such as time goes on.

I’m continuing with the Ludum Dare. I have my guy, I have some simple gravity, and I have some targets that show up when the appropriate stick is waggled. I need to implement some mouse logic as well so the game doesn’t require a controller, but at least I know I need to do that.