A new toolkit to make customizations to CRM 4.0 has been released. Download bits from http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/E2DevTkt

  • View All CRM Entities - Displays a listing of CRM entities that are dynamically available from the CRM Explorer within Visual Studio 2008
  • Create and Update CRM Entities - Allows for creating new entities and updating existing entities from within the CRM Explorer experience
  • Create a Wrapper Class - Provides the ability to auto-generate wrapper classes for entities, which exposes the CRM entities and their corresponding attributes as classes and properties respectively to enable development of code to interact with the entities
  • Generate Plug-in Code - Enumerates the available Plug-ins for an entity and generates the code necessary to jumpstart the plug-in development process
  • Integrate the Build and Deploy Process - Simplifies the process of building and deploying a CRM solution
  • Deploy Across Multiple Servers - Assists in deployment and maintenance of Windows installer packages across multiple environments 

The E2 team would also like to encourage Toolkit users to submit comments, suggestions, or other general thoughts about extending Toolkit functionality to better support the efforts of developers in planning, developing, customizing, and maintaining on-premise deployments of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  To initiate or participate in Toolkit discussions, In Code Gallery, please see visit the Toolkit Discussions tab at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/E2DevTkt/Thread/List.aspx

My current suggestion list looks something like this

  • Suggestions for more features
  • Automatics SDK generation (.chm or other formats)
  • Plug-in registration (automatic)
  • Entity relations ship generation (similar as the SDK app to generate Visio ERD schema)
  • CRM settings from visual studio add-in (link or properties)
  • All possible deployments (CRM online, partner hosted)
  • Storage of Javascript customizations and automatic process to remove blank CHARS ect in file to minimize size (minimizer)
  • Storage for database tunings (custom index ect)
  • Storage for modified or custom SSRS reports