I'm intending this to be the first in a series of posts on Design Patterns for MS CRM. I'm using the term 'Design Pattern' deliberately to echo the same term used in object-oriented design, though I'm not intending the posts to be particularly formal or prescriptive. If you're interested in the more formal ideas of design patterns, wikipedia as good a place as any to start.
My reasons for investing time in this are two-fold:
- I don't like having to do thinkgs more than once. When designing MS CRM solutions for a customer probably about 90% of the design decisions I make now are wholly or partly based on a previous, similar design for another customer. A lot of this information is in my head; the intention of building design patterns is to create a structure to be able to communicate this information to others
- MS CRM solutions are a mix of out-of-the-box functionality, and specific customisations and extensions. This gives a lot of options, and a lot of additional considerations beyond traditional ground-up development, or out-of-box deployment, and I think there's a lot of new and interesting design work that can be done in this environment
