Where is the RSS connector for CRM 3.0

It's stuck in LegalLand right now. It's not really Legal's fault either. When I put the original prototype together for the BizSummit and PDC I was able to take liberties with the set of APIs that I used. Yup, I ended up using unsupported functionality. Shouldn't be much of a surprise, I have access to all the internals, I'm on the team, I needed to get a job done, and this blog has always been about pushing past the envelope.

Turns out that once the connector was public the demand went way up and the internal pressure to release it went up. Problem is there's no dedicated resource for "fixing" the bits that I cheated on. That means that we (read that Microsoft) can't release the connector without doing one of two expensive things: document the undocumented or fix the code.

Ideally I'd like to fix the code. I really didn't push the envelope all that much. In fact, all I did was cheat a bit and use the COMProxy instead of the shiny new SWS (of which I am a long-time champion) for tweaking the requested queries, and I directly access the application-level metadata cache. Fixing the COMProxy issue is an afternoon's worth of work. It really just means pulling the WSDL, ripping out all the bits that have no bearing on RSS (so it loads faster), and tweaking a few query functions. The metadata cache is another issue altogether.

Here's why. The application-level metadata cache has two nice properties: it's already loaded and can be shared with the application thus cutting down on memory requirements, and it has a reasonable object model (note that I didn't say it has a good object model… if it did we would publish it). That means I need to define an object model that makes sense, and I'd want to make it "big enough" to be useful. Plus, I would need to write a bunch of code to read the WS-based metadata data and transform that into the nice object model. I've been assuming that anything I do in that space, once released, will probably end up in general usage (I would actually hope so because I wouldn't want everyone to have to go through this same pain). If I'm right about that then I would want to make sure that the cache is really usable. But then that means I'd need to spend more time "getting it right". There's also the added problem that if I, as an aside, release a metadata cache programming model that people will come to expect something much like it in a future product release (which is why I never made the 1.2 web service code generally available - when I was finally ready to release it the product team took up the banner and built one themselves).

If there really is demand for the RSS stuff and / or the an object-based metadata cache, let me know and I'll try to get it on the radar. If not, let me know and I'll keep working on other things.