Microsoft CRM is a Web-based customer relationship management framework.
Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) developed this product in-house to
complement its purchased accounting offerings of Great Plains Dynamics,
Solomon, Axapta, and Navision. MSCRM is positioned for the
small-to-medium-sized business market and does not attempt to compete with
enterprise-level products like SAP, PeopleSoft, or Oracle. It's less
expensive and integrates well with other Microsoft SMB technologies like
Dynamics, Small Business Server, Office 2003, BizTalk, and the SQL Server
2000 family of products.
There are sales and service CRM modules that can be licensed separately or as
a package. The sales module provides lead-contact-account management and the
opportunity-quote-salesorder-invoice sales processing cycle. The service
module has contracts, support cases, and a knowledge base. ... (more)
ADO.NET is the managed code library for the .NET Framework. Its ancestors
include ODBC, DAO, RDO, ADO, and OleDB. Some of these technologies still
exist in the framework, but most developers rely on the resources provided in
the ADO.NET namespaces. There are evolutionary changes in ADO.NET 2.0 that
will be released next year with Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005, and the
.NET Framework 2.0.
This version has several important design goals. All changes are
evolutionary, so existing 1.1 and 1.0 code should work without modification.
Several key classes were optimized for perform... (more)
Xamlon, a small startup in LaJolla, CA, started with a Windows desktop
product called Xamlon Pro. This package provides developers with a taste for
XAML-based declarative markup programming. XAML is compiled with managed code
to produce applications that run in the Xamlon viewer. This is the same
approach that was promised in the Longhorn timeframe with the new Avalon user
interface engine.
Their newest offering does something similar for Web development, with an
interesting twist. The output is a true Macromedia Flash SWF file. This is
significant given the market coverage of t... (more)