Command Crm Customization Export, Import and Publication

Import, Exporting and publishing customizations in CRM 3.0 using the web interface can be time consuming. Also when an export fails the information returned is very limited. I created a small command line application to do just the same. It uses three WebServices provided by CRM specifically for this purpose.

Localhost and integrated security

One thing I allways run across when installing a new server is that it won't allow connections over the loopback interface when using integrated security. I usually test the applications from the server console and everytime they give errors; 401.1 for most applications but the Microsoft Virtual server administration console for instance returns status 500 with a message parameter incorrect.

The solution is simple and available on the microsoft site.

Captcha

For this site I wanted to add some mechanism to avoid getting the article comments spammed with links and other junk. To this end I added validation using captcha. I found the code to generate the image on the internet and extended it a little. I extended a TextBox control and created a Http Handler to facilitate easy use. The code for these is downloadable here.

Version Control

Version control is important when your developing software. I know I am not the first guy to throw away the wrong file or section off code. When properly installed using source control will also service as atleast a partial backup you of your source. And as an added benefit you can see who did what and when which can be usefull in tracking bugs.

What do I use, how and why?

The CRM webservice

The Crm 3.0 webservice is a great improvement on the 1.2 version but still due to the nature of webservices working with it can require some quite elaborate code. You need to instantiate the class, configure security, create a ColumnSet, add columns to the column set and finally execute the Retrieve method and cast its result. This results in about 10 lines of code for such a simple action. Using partial classes introduced in the .Net 2.0 framework you can extend the Webservice without lossing the easy of recreating the webproxy when you change or and a type. Using generics you can even enforce type safety at compiletime.

This site

As you probably will guess and easily can see this site is written in .NET to be more specific in C# .NET 2.0. It also uses some content management. This basic content management system was written in a single weekend. Granted it isn't entirely fool-proof nor does it offer the options of the system available like DotNetNuke, but using some of the framework .NET features this system offers the same extensibility. The content management is an extension of the framework it self.

Generic strong Type String to Any Converter

This is one of the oldes pieces of code i wrote in .NET and still use. This class is written for conversion of xml node values to a .NET type but can also be used to with plain strings. Every time I needed a node value I had to check if the node existed, is it an element or an attribute before I could even start converting the value. This class handles all this and using generics and the IConvertible interface returns all strongly types and correctly converted.