Complete SDK for CRM 2011 Released

For those of you who have been keeping score, Microsoft has been making available a number of pre-release versions of the SDK for CRM 2011. There was a Beta SDK and a Release Candidate SDK. The complete, official SDK for CRM 2011 has now also been released (version 5.0.1), and is chock full of good things for developers and customizers. It can be downloaded here.

CRM As A Rapid Development Platform

I'm late in getting this post out, but better late than never! Dave Yack released his book "CRM As a Rapid Development Platform" last month. It's an indispensable tool for every developer who is building on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. It's available in printed form or as an e-book, and also includes a ton of code samples and some helpful videos. It's 645 pages long, so you're sure to find plenty in the book that you weren't aware of, even if you've been working with CRM for a long time! I don't know how Dave found the time for this monster, but I'm glad he did!

Microsoft CRM Metadata Browser

For those of you who like to get in under the hood of your CRM system, there's a great feature in both CRM 3.0 and 4.0 that lets you easily display a lot of the information you'll want to know when customizing your system: the Metadata Browser. It lists all of your CRM entities - even your custom entities - and lets you see all the fields and relationships each entity has, as well as things like the Object Type Code and other settings.

The Metadata Browser is easy to access. Simply navigate to http://yourCRMserver/sdk/list.aspx
(obviously replacing 'yourCRMserver' with the name of your CRM server!)

You'll get a nicely formatted webpage with a table listing all of your entities. If you click on the Definition icon for one of the entities you'll see a list of all of the attributes for the entity with all of the attributes for each attribute (now that's some meta-metadata!).

New Version of SDK for CRM 4.0 Available

Microsoft has released an updated version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 SDK, version 4.0.3. It contains updated code samples and an improved version of the Plug-in registration tool. It can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=82E632A7-FAF9-41E0-8EC1-A2662AAE9DFB&displaylang=en