August 4, 2011 – Variables are an important new construct available only in CRM 2011 dialog processes, and store values during the life of a process. They’re good for calculated fields, running sums and the like. In Installment 9 of the serialized version of my upcoming book, I describe how they work and present a highly scientific method of using them to score an opportunity record. Enjoy!

August 2, 2011 – One reason to call a child dialog is to let a user do the same thing again: that’s recursion, and I explained that in Installment #7. Another reason is reuse: call the same child process from several different parent processes. And that, my friend, is the topic of Installment #8 of my upcoming book, Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011.

August 1, 2011 – Recursive dialogs are simpler than recursive workflows, which probably accounts for why Installment 7 from my upcoming book (Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011) is so short. I also include a link to a video. Enjoy!

July 27, 2011 – Here’s Installment 6 of my upcoming book, “Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011″. This one is from a chapter I call “Business Processes in the Real World”, which builds on the previous chapters and basically consists of lots of examples of useful workflows and dialogs. This one’s about using dialogs to create, convert and close records, and while it’s probably too long for a blog post, I wanted to cover the entire topic. Enjoy!

June 28, 2011 – In Installment 5 of my upcoming book, Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011, I cover an important topic for customizers: calling dialog processes with a URL.

June 27, 2011 – In Installment 4, I cover the important topic of how to query CRM data in CRM 2011 dialog processes. Cheers!

June 25, 2011 – Installment #3 from my upcoming book on business processes in CRM 2011. This one covers a couple of foundation topics: working with actions and conditions. Enjoy!

June 21, 2011 – Here’s the second installment of the serialized version of my upcoming book, Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011. In installment 1, I compared dialogs and workflows, discussed dialog properties, and introduced the most fundamental components of dialogs: Pages, and Prompt and Response pairs. In today’s excerpt I drill down and provide some more detail on how to construct Prompts and Responses. Talk about great beach books — just wait til you get to the part on using hyperlinks in Tip Text!

Unlike “A Tale of Two Cities”, my upcoming book, “Building Business Processes in Dynamics CRM 2011″, will be serialized on the author’s blog rather than his literary journal. Plus it won’t take 31 weeks. Here’s Installment 1, on Introducing Dialog Processes.