MS CRM 2011 has been officially released. I finally had some time to spend looking at it last week and I really, really like what I see from a customization and development perspective. Some of the pain has been taken out of customizing MS CRM. But, as with any new version of software, good documentation is hard to find. Since I spent a good part of my learning & playing with MS CRM 2011 finding documentation, I thought I would share some of the links I’ve found that serve as good references and resources to help me get up to speed on the new version.
Form Scripting
When it comes to form scripting, the whole model has changed. Things used to be referenced by “crmForm.property”, but that has been deprecated. It still works, but you should begin using the newly provided Xrm.Page object model. This article explains what the Xrm.Page model is, the collections of various items in the page model as well as a good overview.
Web Services
The web services in MS CRM have changed as well. It used to be there were two services: the main data service and the metadata web service. MS CRM 2011 still has two web services, but they are different. The first is a RESTful web service that uses oData. If you’re not familiar with oData, you can check it out here. [Update 2011-06-27: I've added a post on our blog with some examples of oData in CRM 2011.] Blogger TechHike has a post on “How to get started with oData” that explains the fundamentals of oData. If you want to use oData in CRM 2011, you can find out how to use it in CRM here. Be forewarned that the MS CRM oData service doesn’t fully implement all oData functions. The other web service uses SOAP. You can read about the differences and which is preferred for various scenarios here.
JavaScript
CRM 2011 allows you to include JavaScript libraries – usable blocks of code that can be shared amongst multiple forms and events. Before you had to resort to lots of trickeration to get things like this done. Here is an overview.
Plugins
Plugins aren’t new, but there are some new things about plugins. For a great overview of plugins, this page is a great springboard for other links.
Lastly, for some great videos that explain lots of things about MS CRM, Channel 9 at MSDN has a library of videos that covers a wide variety of topics. In my experience you can just jump right in on a given video that interests you and you won’t be lost if you haven’t seen the others.
CRM 2011 brings a lot of new things to the table from a customization and development perspective and learning them all will take time. Hopefully these links will get you started or at least give you a reference point. I suspect I’ll be bringing up this post for my own use in the future!
Tags: ms crm 2011, ms crm 2011 customization, ms crm 2011 resources, ms crm 2011 scripting
Do you think MS CRM 2011′s oData will be provide any speed advantage, from a developer’s POV?
I do think it will be a speed advantage, particularly for those who are familiar with the oData standard and have experience. Even for those who don’t have oData experience, it’s not hard to learn. Plus, the ability to use it from a variety of sources – jScript, .NET, etc., makes it quite useful.
According to the MSDN Microsoft agrees: “While the SOAP endpoint is also capable of performing create, retrieve, update and delete operations, the REST endpoint provides a better developer experience.”
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