Sunday, April 19, 2009

New Dynamics CRM 4.0 Demo VPC Image Released for Download - 17-Apr-2009

The new Dynamics CRM 4.0 demo virtual image has been released for download 17-Apr-2009.

https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource/deployment/methodology/vpc/MSD_CRM4VPCApril09 (Available to MS partners only)

Similar to previous versions, this in a CRM 4.0 image is on a Window Server 2003 with office, Sharepoint, OCS, Outlook, SQL Server, Reporting Services... Primarily, this is intended to demonstrate the power of CRM to prospective clients. Though many developers use this image as a basis for a development environment.

If you are in sales, then you will be happy to know that the new image is now pre-loaded with some additional accelerators and packed with many demo tools.

As a developer you should probably give a satisfied nod to the fact that there are SDKs and developer tools such as Visual Studio 2008 pre-installed.

My only issue is that due to the accelerators, this is no longer a clean install or a clean base image that I can use for customisaion of a new project. I guess its time to create my own Dev image and stop freeloading.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer Toolkit

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer Toolkit has just been release but the CRM E2 team.

this tool is a major step forward to provide developers with the ability to work with CRM customizations from within the Visual Studio development environment.

As release by the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Team:




The MS CRM E2 team is pleased to announce the release of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Developer Toolkit, which is available for download from the MSDN Code Gallery at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/E2DevTkt

The Toolkit has been designed to make it easier for developers to customize, extend, and maintain an on-premise CRM solution, all from within an integrated Visual Studio environment. Key developer benefits include the ability to:
  • View All CRM Entities - Displays a listing of CRM entities that are dynamically available from the CRM Explorer within Visual Studio 2008
  • Create and Update CRM Entities - Allows for creating new entities and updating existing entities from within the CRM Explorer experience
  • Create a Wrapper Class - Provides the ability to auto-generate wrapper classes for entities, which exposes the CRM entities and their corresponding attributes as classes and properties respectively to enable development of code to interact with the entities
  • Generate Plug-in Code - Enumerates the available Plug-ins for an entity and generates the code necessary to jumpstart the plug-in development process
  • Integrate the Build and Deploy Process - Simplifies the process of building and deploying a CRM solution
  • Deploy Across Multiple Servers - Assists in deployment and maintenance of Windows installer packages across multiple environments


Find more information on this toolkit here.

See Jim Wang's technical blog [MVP] for quick installation instructions.