While cleaning up the navigation at a customer installation today, we ran across something rather interesting.  If you export the CRM SiteMap and look for any of the Quick Campaign entries, you will find the following:
<SubArea
Id="nav_minicamps"
ResourceId="Menu_Label_Mini_Campaigns"
DescriptionResourceId="Quick_Campaign_Description"
Icon="/_imgs/ico_18_minicamps.gif"
[…]

One of the feature requests that I receive quite often while creating custom CRM solutions is the have the ability to disable all or most of the fields on a CRM form based on data selected by the user.
I've researched this off and on for quite a while but was never really able to get […]

This morning I released a small utility to update additional birthday information for CRM Contacts.
During the process of creating this utility, I came upon an interesting design decision.
The original solution proposed by Microsoft was to create an Integer Attribute to track the birthday month for a Contact.  I felt that it was a little more […]

Through the course of the past two years, since I've been working with CRM 3.0, I've run into a very strange situation where I am unable to edit the columns within the CRM View customization editor.
Basically, you can't select a column and if you can't select a column, you can't move it or change its width.  […]

Speaking of toolbar buttons.  Another common practice is to add a toolbar button that will perform some complex operation in JavaScript.  Since you generally don't want the JavaScript itself inside your isv.config.xml file, you need a place to put it where it's easily maintained.  How about in the Form's OnLoad event?
Buttons are added to the […]

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One of my current projects has requirements to add toolbar buttons to allow the user to create a new, related Entity such as a phone call or appointment with a click of a button.
Buttons are added to the toolbar by modifying the isv.config.xml and inserting code similar to the following:
<Button
Title="Phone Call"
[…]

One of my customers modified the mapping between Account and Contact and from that point forward, the received the following error message ( DevErrors are turned on ) when attempting to add a new Contact to an existing Account:

Now that was rather confusing because it only happened if you had an Account open, selected Contacts, […]

One of my current projects required me to create a new Entity record when the user pressed a button that had been added to the toolbar.  The two Entities were related so data is automatically copied from the Parent record to the new Child record.
The only problem I ran into was in making sure that […]

While in a CRM design meeting yesterday, we began discussing adding a picklist to one of the CRM forms.  One of the other developers made the following remark: "This field is also on two other forms. Let's make it a lookup instead."  Excellent advice, by the way, so let's discuss why.
Maintenance
If you have the same […]

Greetings Everyone,
I have another posting on the Microsoft CRM Team Blog today where I discuss creating a Change Request system within CRM.
Download the customizations outlined in the article here.
Thanks, Mitch