Randoom a Michael Friis production

LinqtoCRM obsoleted

Shan McArthur put up a notice that the latest version (4.0.12) of the Microsoft CRM SDK includes Linq querying support. The CRM Team have a couple of blog posts describing the new features. I haven’t tested the new SDK, but I definitely recommend you try it out before using LinqtoCRM and I’ve put a notice to that [...]

Linq-to-SQL, group-by, subqueries and performance

If you’re using Linq-to-SQL, doing group-by and selecting other columns than those in the grouping-key, performance might suffer. This is because there is no good translation of such queries to SQL and Linq-to-SQL has to resort to doing multiple subqueries. Matt Warren explains here. I experienced this firsthand when grouping a lot of geocoded events [...]

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 [...]

Smuggling exceptions out of try-catches with IEnumerable

The code in this post is from a talk by Erik Meijer, I claim no credit.
Take a look at this screenshot:

Pretty wacky huh? Visual Studio has broken into debug mode even though the division is clearly wrapped in a try-catch. Take a guess at what’s going on before reading on.
Here’s the full code listing:
static void [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]