It's been a while since my last post ... in fact more than a year. A lot changed for me since then. One of the main changes is that my struggle with CRM has ended and I've switched to developing with sharepoint. The main reason for that is that I changed my employer. I will now work exclusively with Sharepoint, MOSS and its WCM features. This is something ......

---

Since July 1st Microsoft Dynamics aka MBS changed the requirements for CRM Master Certifications. Have a look here: http://www.microsoft.com/le... If you have partner access you can also have a look here: https://mbs.microsoft.com/p... Maybe you are a MBS CRM ......

---

Think of the following problem: You need to check some data on the server using javascript on the OnSave event of MS CRM. You would instantiate a ActiveX XMLHttp object. Next you would initialize all parameters including the onreadystatechangefunction and then send the request. The data would be returned in your onreadystatechangefunction where you ......

---

For one of my projects I had to extend the menu of the detail form of email entitiy in MS CRM 3.0 Unfortunately I could not do this using ISV.config because it only supports a handful of entities. Email is not one of them.Fortunately MS CRM 3.0 supports java scripting on the onload event of the page. So I injected some new elements into the DOM to add ......

---

Ok, today I got something to laugh about for you guys out there. I don't know why it hasn't happened before, but this week was the first time I had to create a CRM queue on a new 3.0 system. So what I did was to grab my copy of CRM Installation and configuration course documents and proceed the mentioned step by step instructions. I created the user, ......

---

Since I encountered this exception now at 2 customer installations, I have decided to say some things about it here: I don't know why - but in both cases MS CRM Exchange Router stopped working after 2 weeks (this is no joke). Of cource users were complaining that emails didn't show up in CRM anymore. When I checked the event log, I found many error ......

---

Ok, it has nothing to do with MS CRM ... but it seems that everyone is blogging about this great tool today : SQL Prompt. And there is a reason for it. It is sooooooo cool. Everyone in my company is excited about this tool. And the best thing about it: it's for free ... at least until Sept. 1, 2006. If you are a database developer, I think this is a ......

---

MS CRM Reports can be accessed programmatically. But since MS CRM uses SQL Reporting Services, accessing reports is no CRM feature. Fortunately SRS exposes a webservice interface that you can use to do that. Further information can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/l... There ......

---

There is no need to use strong named assemblies in your MS CRM workflow processes. If you want to use unsigned assemblies, you just have to add allowunsignedassemblies to the root element of workflow.config: <workflow.config xmlns="http://microsoft.com... allowunsignedassemblies="tr... Of course this is mentioned in the SDK. But ......

---

When you open Reports from within MS CRM 3.0 after installation, it is possible to receive an error stating something like "An error has occurred during report processing. (rsProcessingAborted) Cannot create a connection to data source 'xxx'. (rsErrorOpeningConnection)". The solution to this error is not easy because there are many possible reasons. ......

---

CRM has a quite cool feature that can save you a lot of programming: URL addressable forms. If you want to let users create or update records, you can use the CRM standard forms. The only thing you have to do: open an new window with the specific URL. If you want to edit a record, you only have to append the id of the specific record. In edition you ......

---

Since Jeffry van de Vuurst pointed out that there is a supported way to achieve manipulating SiteMap XML, ISV.config, Entity manipulation, etc. (thanks for mentioning it) and I have some time, I will update the little code snippet I posted in a previous post. Please use this version. Additional information can be found in the new SDK 3.0.4 (ISV Programming ......

---

IMPORTANT: You should look at the comment posted by Jeffry van de Vuurst first. In the meantime there was a supported way added to SDK 3.0.4 which describes to change entities, ISV.config, ... SiteMap XML is a really cool new feature in MS CRM 3.0. The most exciting thing for me is the ability to restrict access to Areas of the SiteMap by specific privileges ......

---

Yesterday I encountered an interesting problem on a MS CRM 3.0 installation running as default website in IIS. This was due to an upgrade from CRM 1.2 to 3.0. The installation included customizations one of them in form of a HttpModule. Everything worked fine, but viewing reports threw a SecurityException stating that "Request for the permission of ......

---

Yesterday we experienced a quite interesting phenomenon. A colleague of mine tried to create products with the API but received an error from time to time. The error stated that the product number already existed in CRM. But in fact, the product number was unique and did not yet exist in CRM. So we started SQL profiler to dig a little deeper. We found ......

---