Mitch Milam's Dynamics CRM and xRM Discussions

The CRM SDK version 4.0.9 included three Visual Studio templates to help speed up your CRM-related development efforts:

Available Templates

• Plug-in
• Workflow activity
• CRM Add-on web page

The templates may be found in the visualstudiotemplates folder when you unzip the SDK package.

Each template has an accompanying readme.doc file with instructions for installation and usage notes.

Installation

Installation is fairly straightforward, just perform these steps:

1) Navigate to the following folder:

%Documents and Settings%\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#

Note: In most cases, this is your My Documents folder.

2) Create a folder called CRM.

3) Copy each of the three template’s .zip file to the CRM folder.

The templates should now be installed.

Usage

Using the templates within Visual Studio is fairly simple. 

For the Plug-in or Workflow Activity, Select File, New Project, navigate to the CRM folder you created, and you should see the following two templates:

For a web site, select File, New Web Site, then select the AddOnWebPage template shown below:

Plug-In Template

This template provides the basic skeleton necessary to create new CRM plug-in including an often overlooked requirement to pass in configuration information via the secure and unsecure configuration information parameters ( which can be set with the plug-in registration tool ):

You’ll need to add references to the Microsoft CRM SDK assemblies and sign your project before you compile, however.

Workflow Activity Template

This template provides the basic skeleton necessary to create a new workflow activity including attributes and error checking.

The project has been signed so all you need to do is add references to the Microsoft CRM SDK assemblies, add your business logic, and you’ll be ready to go:

CRM Add-On Web Page Template

If you’ve ever needed to create a pop-up dialog that looks like the standard CRM 4.0 interface but actually contains your business logic,this will speed your development.

This template contains a sample dialog with associated styles to replicate the look and feel of the CRM 4.0 dialog.  You just add user interface elements and business logic to make it your own.  Here is how the sample appears:

Conclusion

Hopefully, these new additions to the SDK should help you jump-start your next CRM-related project.  There are other examples of this type of technology on the web so you may wish to perform a little research to see which solution best fits your needs.