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 generating many-to-many classes). This means you can’t mix and match Linq with traditional web service calls, and they had to implement their own create/update functionality. It’s a less gradual and more comprehensive approach than LinqtoCRM but it may give a smoother experience for the programmer. At any rate, I welcome xRM LINQ onto the CRM query provider stage and wish them the best of luck :-).
A less welcome addition is a company called Softpedia, a Romanian outfit. I won’t link to them, to avoid giving them any more Google Juice, but you can find them by googling LinqtoCRM. They seem to be screen-scraping CodePlex and similar sites for projects with permissive licenses and then put up copy-cat pages with downloads for these project on their own site. While not illegal, it’s not very useful for project owners or users either. They’ve been caught inflating their Wikipedia article and many user report trojans and similar on siteadvisor (to be fair, this seems to happen for other popular download sites too).
In other news, a new version of LinqtoCRM is out. It fixes some bugs that have surfaced over the last few months. I’ve also reorganised the wiki, hopefully making it easier for people to find what they’re looking for.