Automatic provisioning of Organizations

Microsoft CRM does have a separate webservice for doing deployment related activities. There is a Deployment SDK especially for this webservice. You can download that here. One of the activities you can execute is automatic provisioning of new organizations. In this post I'll dive into the code required for this as well as some of the common issues while doing so.Basically following the next

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Plugin registration tools for Visual Studio 2005

The newest update of the SDK, version 4.0.8, includes updated projects for the plugin registration tool as well as the plugin developer tool. While I usually am pleased with updates, this update could cause some issues for some people. The updated projects are build in Visual Studio 2008 whereas they used to be build in Visual Studio 2005. This means that you will not be able anymore to run the

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Read-only URL Addressable Form

The SDK does describe URL Addressable Forms, but one thing which I do miss on this page, is details around how to link to a form in readonly format. This is done by using the following URL:http://server/orgname/_forms/readonly/readonly.aspx?objTypeCode=objectTypeCode.Of course you need to change the server to servername, orgname to organization name and the objectTypeCode to the entity object

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Creating Environment independent solutions

When developing a solution for CRM, make sure that it runs on all different crm environments. Many implementations have their CRM installation on another port compared to the development environments. A way to handle this, is to look at the location of MS CRM as it is stored in the registery.// Set default valuesprivate const string CRM_REG_DIRECTORY = @"software\Microsoft\mscrm\";private const

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Interesting issues with the CRMDateTime continuum.

This is a guest post by a friend and colleague of mine: Leon Krancher. He has been digging into an issue regarding CRMDateTime and integration. Make sure you read this before you start your own integration!Well I guess I’d better start off with a little introduction. My name is Leon Krancher and I’m a colleague of Ronald at Avanade. As we both work with CRM we occasionally find time to get

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FetchXML into a DataSet

Once upon a time in the Netherlands there was this developer who was working on MSCRM for quite some time. He started to notice that he had to search again and again for the same questions. Luckily he heard about the term 'blogging' and so he started to post the most frequent questions on a blog. The goal was to be able to quickly retrieve the information that he had found earlier. The fact that

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Set a lookup to NULL

Quite often I see this question in the newsgroup: How do I set a lookup to a NULL value?Here is the answer for when you're working in server side code:Entity.Lookup = new Lookup(); Entity.Lookup.IsNull = true; Entity.Lookup.IsNullSpecified = true; this also works for customers:contact.parentcustomerid = new Customer();contact.parentcustomerid.IsNull = true;contact.parentcustomerid.IsNullSpecified

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Callout design issue

Last week I noticed some weird behaviour in MS CRM. For a business requirement I created a callout. The callout would perform some business logic as soon as an appointment gets created. The business logic should only run if the activty gets created by a quick campaign. Don't ask me for the reason, but that was requested.No problem, I created a pre callout which runs on the appointment's OnCreate

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Territory manager cannot belong to other territory

If you're working with territories by using the SDK, you might get this error message:0x80043805: Territory manager cannot belong to other territoryThis happens if you want to make a specific user manager of two territories. This is possible, but you will have to make sure that the field 'territory' is set to NULL of this user. When you change the manager field of a territory by using the SDK,

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How to set the parent account via SDK

Last week I've been working on a migration application. One requirement in the application was to set the parent account of child accounts. It could be that a parent account has a parent account itself as well. So in my application I have followed this approach:- For each account in the source, create an account in CRM 3.0- For each account in the source, map the parent account to a crm accout

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Showing a sorted list of the entities

When you want to show a list of entities, then you'd need the MetadataService. The code is not that hard to fetch a list of these entities. There's even an example in the SDK. The code to get all entities including custom entities would be:MetadataService.MetadataService service = new MetadataService.MetadataService();service.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;Metadata md

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Callout not working?

Lets write a bit more about how to get a callout to work and to make debugging available. I already wrote something about this before in this post: Callout debug: Access is Denied.So your callout is not fired? Here are some thoughts to get started. Make sure that:- the callout even should fire. Are you using the right callout? Special attention to the email PreSend and PostDeliver callouts:

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Determine which priviledges are required

I do assume that you do not provide the end user administrator rights on the crm installation. You probably have defined your own security role with the least priviledges the user should posess. Well how do you know what priviledges the user should posess?There's an update to the online SDK with this information. You can browse to this url and you'll see a list of messages. Under each message the

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Stop using VS 2003 and start using VS 2005 for CRM Development

Most of the development for MS CRM v3.0 I do in Visual Studio 2003. This is because callouts needs to be built on .NET Framework v1.1. All the projects built with Visual Studio are .NET Framework v2.0. Since I dont want to switch between several IDE's all the time, I only use VS 2003.Today is the day that I found a very interesting blog posting of Arash. See this post for information on how to

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Optimize MS CRM webservice

Currently I'm working on an import program. I have to import thousands and thousands of records. Usually the crm system is quite fast, but with these huge loads, I'm getting quite anoyed by the performance of the MS CRM webservice. It even causes error messages like "The underlying connection was closed: Unable to connect to the remote server.". Now there are some performance tweaks available. I

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Fetch all records

Have you ever tried to write a code which will get you all records from a specific entity? It's harder then you think it is! Everybody who is a bit aware of the CRM SDK thinks it should be a fetch statement like this:

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Save disabled fields

Hi!I was reading a posting of Ben Vollmer about "Doing Math in Microsoft CRM aka Calculated Field". This is an interesting article, but I noticed something in the posting that I did not know yet. There is a possibility to submit fields which are disabled! I have been using calculated fields before, but I always enabled the field when submitting the page.So what is the solution? The use of the

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File or assembly name Microsoft.Crm.MetadataService, or one of its dependencies, was not found

Imagine.. You're writing a wonderful MS CRM 3.0 addon. After writing lines and lines of code, the time is there to run and test the addon. Instead of seeing your fantasic, state-of-the-art, rocket-science, cutting-edge addon, it is this message that arises:Parser Error Message: File or assembly name Microsoft.Crm.MetadataService, or one of its dependencies, was not found.Great.Now how to solve

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Callout debug: Access is Denied

I'm not sure if more people are experiencing the same thing, but at least I'd like to share this information with you.After creating a debug build of a callout, I do copy the dll and pdb files to the \Microsoft CRM\Server\bin\assembly folder. Now I can normally debug the callout. But after modifying the code and copying the files again, then I cannot step into the code. CRM just steps over the

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Finally there: Show and hide fields based on the users role!

Hi all,I've been posting around showing and hiding fields more often. I won't be talking about that now, instead I'll be discussing the ability to perform JavaScript coding based on the users role.This solution is very neat and very clean, though unsupported!!! Now... Let's get started and dig into this.MS CRM has a lot of Javascript codes delivered with the product. One of these codes is located

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