Thursday 22 May 2008

Blog Update - Links to Code Gallery Resources

I've added an extra section to this blog. This is a list of all my published resources on the MSDN Code Gallery, along with a link to all other CRM-related resources there. At the time of posting, there were 66 resources in the code gallery with a CRM tag.

Posting on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog

I've been invited to post again on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog. This time I've included information about plugin messages, and how a couple of tools can be used to record information about all plugin events on a CRM 4.0 deployment. The article is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/05/21/plugins-which-message-and-which-pipeline.aspx

The two tools are both available on the MSDN Code Gallery:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/crm40pluginbulk
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/crm40pluginlogger

Wednesday 21 May 2008

Some Plugin Tools

I've posted 2 resources (.Net projects) to the MSDN Code Gallery to assist with writing and deploying plugins for CRM 4.0.

One tool is a logging tool This writes details about any plugin event to SQL tables. This records standard event data - date, message, primary entity, stage and pipeline - and also any data passed in property bags - InputParameter, OutputParameter, PreEntityImage, PostEntityImage and SharedVariable. I find this very useful when determining what information is passed for each message.

The other tool is a registration tool. This is a set of enhancements to the plugindeveloper that is included in the CRM 4.0.4 SDK. The main enhancement is to allow registration of a plugin against all messages or all entities. I use this in conjunction with the logging tool to allow me to quickly build an environment that captures all customisable plugin events on a CRM deployment. This tool makes use of the sdkmessagefilter class to determine which combinations of plugin event and message are available on a CRM deployment

Both resources on the Code Gallery contain the full source code, which is made available under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), as well as installation instructions

More information about these tools, and an explanation of the code will shortly be posted on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Team Blog. Rather than repeat the content here, I'll post a link when it's live.

Updated 21-05-08: The Team Blog link is http://blogs.msdn.com/crm/archive/2008/05/21/plugins-which-message-and-which-pipeline.aspx