Thursday, April 23, 2009

Opportunity Close in Plug-ins

I was working with a plug-in that needed to be fired when an opportunity is won. It took me a while to figure out what messages to register the plug-in with. I tried Update, SetState, SetStateDynamicEntity and could not get it working. Finally I got it working by using the 'Win' & 'Lose' messages.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Developing Plug-ins

Plug-Ins. I recently had to develop my first plugin and to say the least it was an experience. After ploughing through numerous blogs and documentation I finally got it working. Here are some tips if you are starting out to develop plug-ins.
  1. Ensure you have the latest copies of the SDK dlls. If not you could run into earlier sdk bugs.
  2. Ensure tht you have the latest update rolloups. My plug-in was throwing http 401 errors until I installed the latest rollups.

  3. Use dynamic entities instead of the web service references. It is a little harder to understand and get working but will payoff in the long run.

  4. Learn to debug plug-ins and how to find the detailed error messages. You will need it.

  5. Understand the entity-message mapping.

  6. Download the Microsoft CRM Developer toolkit.

  7. Download the latest Plug-in registration tool.

I hope the above helps.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Welcome to yet another Microsoft CRM Blog! MY name is Rocky Sharma and I am a Microsoft CRM consultant.
Why another blog? Bacause I've come to realise that often answers you seek can only be realised by gleaning bits of information from all relevant blogs and then applying the bits that are relavent to what you are trying to achive. I'm only a small time player and always to towards master bloggers like George Doubinski and Michael Hohne and many others including the Microsoft CRM team bloggers for inspiration and indepth expert opinions. So I will put my opinons and discoveries on this blog and hope that you will find it usefull in someway.