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.

In CRM 2011 there are two approaches you can use to create solutions; Managed and unmanaged. There is lots of information available as to what the differences are, for example on channel 9. In general I would recommend using managed solutions every time you are exporting customizations from one environment to the next (in a dev, test, prod environment). But this article specifically addresses the development of applications/products using multiple solutions. I have seen various approached used and people running into problems caused by developing multiple unmanaged solutions in one organization.

NuGet is an open source initiative that 'Makes it easy to install and update open source libraries in Visual Studio' or so it says on the website. Basically its a Visual Studio plugin that allows you to add packages to individual projects. These packages can contain different things such as assemblies, commonly source files etc. With support for both an online public repository as well as the ability to use local repositories it makes it a good way to save your libraries, even if it is only for your self or your team.

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 working with CRM you end up doing a lot of things over and over again.

One of the new features in CRM 2011 is called Solutions. This feature allows developers to group customizations into predefined packages and import/export these to different organizations. This basically is an improvement of the CRM 4.0 customization import/export. On top of simple grouped import/export solutions can be defined as managed, limiting the abilities to change the solution once import into a different organization. A managed solution can also be deleted.

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.

In CRM 2011 Javascript is no longer embedded in forms but now has build in feature to use external resource files. You can edit these files using the web browser or in an external editor. Visual studio supports Intellisense for JavaScript, this explains how enable the support for the CRM provided objects such as the Xrm.Page object to be shown.

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.

For some records it can be very usefull to copy it. This avoids repetive entry of the same data. If you have a relation on the entity which references itself you can do this using a mapping. But if you do not have a relation and do not whish to create on you can copy the values using the following sample.