Dossies @ Work: Dynamics 365 CDS

So you upgraded your CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011, but still use the CRM 4.0 Adapter in your Scribe integrations (Scribe Adapter for CRM 2011 will be released the end of March 2011). No worries: if you don't use hosted CRM, your integrations will still work. The Scribe Adapter for MSCRM 4.0 works with all CRM 2011 entities that existed in MS CRM 4.0. So as long as you don't use new CRM 2011 functionality (Connections, Sharepoint, Auditing...) in your integrations and it is a CRM 2011 On Premise or a CRM 2011 online version, you can use the MSCRM 4.0 Adapter without any problems. As we all know, the old MSCRM 4.0 endpoint is still accessible in CRM 2011, so the compatibility sounds logical. The reason that you can't use the adapter in a CRM 2011 hosted environment is because of the Claims Based authentication used in this environment. The authenticaton is not supported by the old adapter. This will be no problem with the new CRM 2011 adapter. Please note that you will need a...

I already used a number of times queries in my custom applications/reports that use the CRM tables instead of the Filtered Views. I know this is not the supported way to go, but sometimes it is just more performant to use the tables directly. Although using the CRM tables instead of the views can give already a performance boost (escpecially because you bypass the security), sometimes the performance could still be better. These are some simple tuning tips I collected during my 'SQL Query Journey' with thanks to the SQL Server community: Don't return unnecessary columns. Returning too many columns ( select * from ) can have a negative impact on performance. So only return the columns you really need. Use the LIKE operator with caution. Like with the value enclosed in wildcards ("%...%") almost always causes a table scan. Also negative operations ( or NOT LIKE) are not very efficient. If you are only checking for existence, use the IF EXISTS or the IF NO...

Every self respecting MS CRM blogger has posted a list of nice CRM 2011 features on their blog, so I felt obliged to follow the trend. Here is my Top 10 list of nice CRM 2011 features (don't pay too much attention at the order): 1) WCF (.NET 4.0) This is my number 1 favourite. CRM 2011 uses WCF now instead of asmx web services (which will definitely be a good thing for performance). CRM also makes use of .NET 4.0 and the primitive CRM types are now represented as their underlying .NET data types. So no more CrmDateTime, but plain old System.DateTime. 2) Out of the box SharePoint integration. In a couple of minutes you can configure an integration between CRM and SharePoint. Nice! 3) Outlook Client CRM is now inside your Outlook. No more web based integration, but a full Outlook experience. 4) Solutions CRM 2011 allows you to bundle components and treat them as a solution. So you can now create your own customizations in a personal solution and have some sort of versi...

I was doing the following: in my orchestration I was sending a message to a custom WCF service. The message was build dynamically (custom .NET class) and passed to a send port configured for a WCF service. All looked fine (and compiled correctly) until I ran the application: I received the "The adapter failed to transmit message going to send port" error. After some investigation it turned out I received the error because the type of the message I was sending through the send port did not match with the type the WCF expected at the other end. After updating my message with the correct namespace, all worked fine again.