Randoom a Michael Friis production

LinqtoCRM and updating entities

There are some pitfalls when retrieving CRM entities with LinqtoCRM and trying to update them through the CRM web service. The most intuitive (but wrong) approach would be this:
var res = from c in p.Linq()
select c;

foreach (var con in res)
{
con.address1_line1 = “foo”;
service.Update(con);
}
This fails unfortunately. I think someone at Netcompany (my former employer) worked [...]

LinqtoCRM competitor and new version

A few days, a former collegue alerted me to xRM LINQ, a new commercial query provider for Microsoft CRM. I’ve downloaded the trial, of course, and it looks pretty good. xRM LINQ decided not to use usual web service classes and instead provide their own class generator/entity mapper (LinqtoCRM has one too, but only for [...]

Querying relationships with LinqtoCRM

I’ve just recorded a web cast demontrating joins with LinqtoCRM. The piece de resistance is a join across a many-to-many relationship with the intermediary class generated by CRMMetal:
var res = from u in p.Linq()
join sr in p.Linq() on u.systemuserid.Value equals sr.systemuserid.Value
join r in p.Linq() on sr.roleid.Value equals r.roleid.Value
[...]

LinqtoCRM 0.3.0 released

There’s a new version of LinqtoCRM out, get it here. Petteri Räty has rewritten the query-generation engine so that arbitrary selectors are supported. He has also squashed some nasty predicate-bugs and added more unit tests. I’ve implemented a CRMMetal tool that generates classes for many-to-many relationships and joins across these are now supported.
I’ve also recorded [...]

CRMMetal and LINQtoCRM

As you may know, Microsoft introduced many-to-many relationships in version 4.0 of Dynamics CRM. Unfortunately, querying these relationships is not supported through the general web service entities as the intermediary entities are not exposed. Fetch XML works fine however (and don’t forget this great hack to generate FetchXML). The missing entities meant that LINQtoCRM didn’t [...]

LinqtoCRM 0.2.5 released

A little over a week ago, I got a wonderful email from Mel Gerats. He’s implemented a bunch of new features for LinqtoCRM, including Count, Skip/Take, Contains, EndsWith, StartsWith. There’s also support for chained queries and for returning CRM entities as well as anonymous types.
Mel also found a way to decouple LinqtoCRM from the web [...]

Microsoft CRM 3.0 32 bit to 4.0 64 bit

Last week I helped a client move from CRM 3.0 32 bit to CRM 4.0 64 bit. Note that 3.0 never came in a 64 bit version so the 32->64 bit upgrade has to happen on the 4.0 side. The procedure described below assumes the existence of a 32 bit staging server to keep the [...]

LinqtoCRM, now with demo!

Version 0.2.3 is now up and I’ve made a “getting started” video for your amusement. There are now two downloads. The first one is the entire solution for you to hack on, the second is the minimal amount of code you need to write Linq queries in you own CRM project. Get it here, demo [...]

New version of LinqtoCRM

I haven’t updated the project for a while, but Michael Höhne sent me some fixes that I’ve merged. I’ve also compiled the project with Visual Studio 2008 RTM and run it against CRM 4.0 RC0 (partnersource link). Get it here.
Michael H. has hinted that he might contribute more, and I expect to pour some time [...]

Using templates to do auto-signatures in client side javascript

WARNING — unsupported CRM hacking below!
A client wanted signatures to be inserted automatically in emails sent from CRM. I wanted to use the built-in template-feature, but the button on the email form launches a modal dialog which makes it hard to script. I was just about to give up and do a callout, when my [...]