I spent some time this weekend working on a utility that relies on the CRMService Import, Export, and Publish methods.  While the sample code shipped with the CRM SDK ( v3.0.5 ) is fairly useful, I thought I'd give you a more real world example of the ImportAllXml and ExportAllXml API methods;

ImportAllXml

Import all customizations from an XML file.  For more information, review the following SDK documentation. Substitute the SDK example with the following code, which reads the XML from a file.

// Set up the CRM Service.
CrmService service = new CrmService();
service.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

// This is a potentially long running operation. The default 90-second
// time-out might be too short.  Set the time-out to be 5 minutes.
// This property takes milliseconds.
service.Timeout = 300 * 1000; 

using(System.IO.StreamReader reader =
         new System.IO.StreamReader("importfile.xml"))
{
    string entityXml = reader.ReadToEnd();
    // Create the request.
    ImportAllXmlRequest importRequest = new ImportAllXmlRequest();

    // Tell the request where the XML is located.
    importRequest.CustomizationXml = entityXml;    // Execute the import.
    ImportAllXmlResponse importResponse =
        (ImportAllXmlResponse)service.Execute(importRequest);
}

ExportAllXml

Export all customizations to an XML file.  For more information, review the following SDK documentation. Substitute the SDK example with the following code, which writes the XML to a file.

//Set up the CRM Service.
CrmService service = new CrmService();
service.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;

// Create the request.
ExportAllXmlRequest request = new ExportAllXmlRequest();

// Execute the request.
ExportAllXmlResponse response =
    (ExportAllXmlResponse)service.Execute(request);

using(System.IO.StreamWriter writer =
         new System.IO.StreamWriter("exportfile.xml"))
{
    writer.Write(response.ExportXml);
    writer.Flush();
}