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CRM 4.0 offers built-in customization tools in the Settings à Customization area. Here you can build new CRM Entities, Attributes (data fields), modify the CRM Form layout, build new integrations through IFrames, as well as custom client-side code. The latter offers a simple yet powerful means to improve the user experience with custom logic or data validation, dynamic interaction between the User and the CRM Form (such as showing/hiding data fields or entire sections, setting Required levels, etc), retrieving data from the DB, setting field values, etc. This allows for rapid development of customizations and modifications to the CRM UI. These tools, while the being the backbone of CRM's rapid development capabilities, can cause problems in a larger development context.
When you have more than one developer working on a CRM 4.0 project, there is no ability to know who is working on what, and more importantly, when using the OOTB customization tools, there is no sense of versioning, source control, nor the ability to "roll-back" your customizations. As such, many developers have suffered from "stepping on each other's code" during the development process. This has been a well documented issue that will be fixed with the next release (CRM 5.0). In the meantime, many brilliant developers in the CRM community have release a wide array of development tools designed to alleviate these short comings and provide developers a more controlled development environment.
In this post I will present you with the top ten development tools for CRM 4.0 that can benefit your development team to provide a consistent, controlled, and efficient development environment.
1.) CRM Developer Toolkit: Released by the Dynamics CRM E2 Team, this is hands-down the best .NET development tool for Dynamics CRM 4.0. It can be found at the MSDN Code Gallery: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/E2DevTkt/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=2485
2.) Stunnware Tools: Stunnware is an ISV that has some great tools for developers. If you have spent more than an hour surfing the Dynamics CRM community websites, you have probably seen a post form Stunnware's founder, Michael Höhne. The Stunnware Tools Framework can be found at http://www.stunnware.com/ in the "Products" area.
3.) Searchable Property Update Manager
4.) Intellisense For JScript
5.) Form JScript Manager: This
6.) Plugin Registration Tool
7.) VPC Demonstration Tools
8.) Data Mapping Editor Tool
9.) ISV Config Manager
10.) Dynamics CRM Developers Tool: A combined Entity and Plug-in Browser for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Allows you to browse the entire entity model beyond the standard list.aspx Entity Browser. And a plug-in browser which offers a GUI to view and update plug-in registrations.This tool incorporates an entity browser which allows you to browse all the entities, their attributes and available SDK messages. Second it has a Plug-in browser which allows you to browser, create, update and delete plug-ins registered on the connected system.
Posted by Elaine Crooks on Wed - Sep 30, 2009 at 9:00 am EDT
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