Kids, don't try this at home!

I've been working on a little Visual Studio 2012 add-in to allow Dynamics CRM 2011 developers to link & publish web resources directly from the IDE. It's been awhile since VS2012's release, CRM E2 team has yet to release a supported version of the developer toolkit. I posted a workaround few months ago but that only works if you have VS 2010 and 2012 installed side by side.

Not too long ago we needed to convert a managed solution into an unmanaged one, initially I tried a few things like toggling flags in the solution.xml but that didn't work so went straight to the database. Those who turned up to TechEd NZ DYN401 saw this in action, for anyone that missed out here is the session on Channel9.

The existing CRM Developer Toolkit doesn't install on Visual Studio 2012. The reason is the installer has a check on a registry key which points to Visual Studio 2010. The way to get around this is to edit the MSI and modify this key. To modify MSI files there is a tool called Orca.

While browsing the Dynamics CRM 2011 Development forum I came across a post asking where people store their settings for ISV extensions. The way I’ve done this is by creating a custom entity called “Settings” with 3 fields, Key, Value and Encrypted (yes/no).

I came across an issue with an upgrade from CRM 4 to CRM 2011 where the images were all messed up, transparency was gone and had pixelated images, there were over 100 custom entities and download/uploading these manually was not an option.

I recently needed to write a plugin that associated multiple different record types with a custom entity. The custom entity contained over 30 system many to many relationships with the other record types. 

We use a lot of automated tools to deploy solutions to our test, UAT and production environments. One of the tools allows us to rapidly deploy a solution into multiple environments. For example, extracting a managed solution from DEV to TEST then to UAT, once UAT has passed we need to deploy up to 20 Dynamics CRM Online instances, doing this manually is too time consuming…

After an upgrade of CRM 4 to CRM 2011 the plugin registration tool will sometimes show (Plugin) instead of the actual plugin type name.