4th Dynamics CRM Accelerator is now available for Download!

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untitled Over the weekend the 4th Microsoft Dynamics Accelerator – eService was released for download on Codeplex:

https://www.codeplex.com/crmaccelerators/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=19956

It allows users to expose CRM functionality via the Web. Included out of the box are custom webcontrols as well as sample pages that allow you to :

  • Ability to Add/Edit:
    • Your own Contact Information
    • Your Notes
    • Service Cases
  • Ability to Create Users (Allows you to adds contacts against an account)
  • Search & display Knowledge Base Articles
  • Schedule a service activity

The documentation for this module is very comprehensive – and I also suggest you download & view the 21 minutes long screencast on how to set up this module as it hooks into several architecture layers.

Looking through the documentation, I would suggest just downloading it & keeping the documentation even if you aren’t interested in the accelerator itself as it has some very detailed code examples of how to interact with CRM using the Web Services. There are examples of Adding & editing Entities, searching KB articles, adding a service activity, working with Dynamic Entities and querying the CRM data. There’s even a really nice Regex example of how to extract the KB article and exclude the un-needed wrapping elements so you can display it nicely in a web page. :)

The only thing I am seeing is missing in the documentation is any error catching (Try/Catch blocks) – Although I haven’t checked the actual code out in detail yet so it may be there. One of the benefits of the accelerators is that as the code is provided open source – so you could always add that yourself & recompile the user controls!