In CRM 2011 Web Resources you can connect to other resources on the CRM server. This can be the CRM web services or you may want to redirect to another web resource. To do this you need the full URL which can differ depending on the deployment.

Consider the following For most projects in CRM you have to build an entity model sometimes just a few entities but depending on your project this can be a very large number. Most consultants first create an inventory of what to create using excel, next this has to be transferred to CRM. This is a very time consuming process which requires a huge amounts of copy pasting and clicking. Then when you have it all setup the customer asks you to make some simple changes, “Could you change this decimal field to a money field?” Simple enough, no? You have to delete the field from the form and views delete the field create a new one, add it back to the forms and views again, now where was it exactly? Tough the CRM entity model provides you with rich abilities for the end user creating and modifying the entity model can be time consuming. All this time cannot be spend on providing the business logical and rules the entity model is built for.

When coding with early bound entities you still need the attribute names in some cases, for instance when you are building a query expression. You can just add the name as a string but then you run the risk of mistyping the name. I have created a solution for this problem.

Usually when you are working with CRM and doing scripting you have to work in the small text box with no real coding support. Also you have the restrictions that you cannot create reusable functions etc. There allready are several examples and approaches to solve this problem but for completion I have added these examples. This contains two different approaches one using files location on the CRM server the other using resources files.

CRM support user working in multiple time zones by storing alle date time values as UTC. This way the time can be easily adjusted to the users time zone setting. This article explains this in a bit more detail. This also applies to date values, some dates such as a birth date can be fixed regardless of time zone. CRM will still adjust these to the time zone, this may show as a full day difference in the user interface.

When you are developing with a virtual PC which is running in its own domain or want to debug any other system which is in a different domain than you own user remote debuggin will normally fail on authentication errors.

Microsoft CRM 4.0 has several methods to add functionality, to create custom workflow in CRM you have two options plugins and workflows.

In reporting queries it happens often that you need a ruler of some sort for instance a table containing all days between a start and end date. You can generate such tables by using a looping construct but this isn't the strong point of SQL.

The CRM 4.0 plug-in model offers great capabilities. But when working with the plug-in messages you would need to know which input and output parameters are available. Unfortunaly this is not (yet) in the supplied documentation, but here it is.

This class is written for conversion of xml node values to a .NET type but can also be used to with plain strings. Accepts an XML node an returns strong type value of any convertible type