An overview of environments to support Dynamics CRM development

In my current Dynamics CRM project, I am the solution architect for a new initiative that was set up as a “mini-project” separate from the existing CRM solution’s production support and feature enhancement teams. We had our own PM, testing team, business analysts and developers. As we approach go-live of our solution, we are at a point where we are now integrating our work with the other work streams, and this has led me to wax philosophical on the optimal arrangement of environments (dev, QA, production, etc. »

In which we explore unsupported Dynamics CRM database operations

If you work with Dynamics CRM long enough, I can almost guarantee you will one day encounter a problem where a direct SQL insert/update/delete (DML) against your CRM database is either the only possible solution or the alternatives are so cumbersome as to make the direct SQL approach the only practical solution. »

Displaying Dynamics CRM FetchXML results in ASPX with XSLT

Last week I wrote a post that showed how to retrive the raw SOAP response from a Dynamics CRM query in C#, but I didn’t show how to do anything useful with it. In today’s post I will show a practical example of how to execute a FetchXML request against a Dynamics CRM instance, capture the raw SOAP response and transform it with XSLT for display in an ASPX page. »

Accessing raw SOAP requests/responses from Dynamics CRM web services in C#

One of the things I have always found frustrating about WCF is that it effectively hides the actual SOAP message XML requests and responses in web service calls. From a Dynamics CRM perspective, I can think of at least three good reasons it would be nice to be able to access the raw XML generated and consumed by clients built with the SDK: »

Misadventures with CRM 2011 web services and ADFS

I think the Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK is swell for interoperability, but I wanted to get a closer look at how the actual web service calls work, so I decided to access the sandbox CRM instance my company provides using a WSDL-based proxy as described here. Because the SDK has several examples for connecting to CRM instances using different kinds of authentication in the SDK\SampleCode\CS\WsdlBasedProxies directory, I figured this would be a piece of cake. »