What I’ve been thinking about…

Originally published at http://goo.gl/bkewP1

​I can’t really take a lot of credit for this post. All of the difficult work was done by a couple of Dynamics gurus.

XRM Prep Plug-in

This is a plugin for XrmToolBox (http://xrmtoolbox.codeplex.com/) by Tanguy Touzard. Great thanks to Tanguy for releasing XrmToolBox and providing really solid documentation on how to create Plug-ins for it. XrmToolBox and his numerous other very useful Dynamics CRM tools, which all now run in XrmToolBox, are a great value to the Dynamics CRM community.

The idea, implementation logic, and solution file that are the basis for this plug-in are the work of Marc Schweigert from Microsoft. (more…)

Originally published at http://goo.gl/XXm6z5

​I wanted to bring your attention to two items that can be very useful for all of us working on Dynamics CRM.
As you are aware, CRM customization and development has never really worked well with enterprise focused application lifecycle management (ALM.) The export capability (even with Solutions in 2011) has never worked very well with source code control and change management. (more…)

Originally published at http://goo.gl/C1n3Hw

If you have worked with the Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK you are probably very familiar with the Request/Response model messages in Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Messages. As a developer trying to write good code I always want to wrap any service call in a Try/Catch statement to provide proper error handling. Another goal is to keep the code as neat as possible for when I – or someone else – has to go back and read it. Wrapping calls in Try/Catch statements increases the total lines of code it takes to implement functionality and makes the code more difficult to read. (more…)