Cross domain remote debugging

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.

How do you set this up ...

Crm 4.0 Sitemap & ISV.Config Editor

As of CRM 4.0 the sitemap and isv.config file are no longer available on the file system but stored in the database. Which means that for each change you have to export the customization, make your changes and then reimport the customizations file.

This tools is indented to make this easier.

For more information click here.

Plug-ins and Workflows: Extension of Microsoft CRM 4.0

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

Generating an Time table in SQL

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.

Source control server setup

For my source control I use subversion and I found the easiest method to install a fully working subversion server (combined with trac for issue tracking) is to do that on linux. I can setup a clean server from scratch in about an hour including all required configuration. For a windows server I would need that just to install windows and get all the software packages. Best thing is I have a single script to do this, this also includes some scripts to facilitate backups and setting up new subversion/trac repositories.

CRM 4.0 Plug-in message input parameters

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.

Crm Developers Tool

A combined Entity and Plug-in Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Allows you to browse the entire entity model beyond the standard list.aspx Entity Browser. And a plug-in browser which offers a GUI to view and update plug-in registrations.

For more information click here.

CrmService Testing v1.1

I have added some new features to the Crm Test service proxy which you can read about in this article. The changes allow you to dicate which requests are expected and validation is then handled by the base class.

Embedded Sql, LINQ like behaviour

When ever you create an application which uses a database. There certainly are variatons but you have basically two option when it comes to how you have de SQL-Statements. You can choose to type the SQL-statements in the source code or you can create stored procedures. Both of these have their own advantages and disadavatanges.
In-code statements ensure that when te application is deployed, no stored procedures have to be updated. Stored procedures on the other hand offer better speed and reusablility.

To allow stored procedures to be created, maximize easy of deployment I created the this. The .sql files can be edited in either Visual Studio or the SQL Management studio with full support of the syntax checkers and code-Highlighting. This class does have one other main feature it makes each declared procedure available as a strong type .NET class to access the parameters.

Testing without touching the CrmService

If you have ever tried to do unit testing on code which uses the Microsoft Crm Webservice proxy you will is nearly impossible to test just that code. I will allways rely on the Crm Server for data and callouts to function and test these in to process. This article offers a class implementation which actually stubs out the CrmService request.