CRM as a Rapid Development Platform at Dominant Systems Book Store

Leveraging Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 as an application development platform to build real world business solutions that go beyond what you think of as "Just CRM" Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides all the capabilities to be a foundation for building line of business applications and saves you a ton of time! In this book, you will learn that CRM is an application development platform not just a CRM package. We will explore how its declarative data modeling, security model, dynamic SOA Web Service creation and other platform services make it a fast and easy platform for development. CRM 4.0 uses popular developer technologies like SQL Server, SQL Server Reporting Services and Windows Workflow Foundation for process automation. See how you can build your applications on top of it, integrate with it or simply extend it using ASP.NET, SharePoint, Silverlight, Virtual Earth, Custom Workflow Activities, Mobile and more.

Customer Reviews & Comments
This book is a must for any developer that is considering building an application that integrates with CRM, or for customizing a CRM deployment. The book starts out with a great overview of all the new features available in CRM 4 to help understand some of the new capabilities in the new platform that affect how you use the CRM SDK. The next chapter covers an overview of how you would build a line of business application that integrates with CRM, and all the different types of CRM customization that are possible. The third chapter focuses on how you should set up your development environment and get used to working with the various web services. These three introductory chapters are necessary to be productive using the CRM SDK. Chapter 4 deals with data modeling, including a great explanation for what comes out-of-the-box and how to model your own custom entities. This chapter comes with a lot of great tips and really does a great job describing how the entity model of the CRM is laid out. Chapters 5 and 6 include a full description of all the techniques that you can use to customize the html forms in CRM. Customization of the user interfaces is always a requirement for end users as they want their user interfaces to be as efficient and intelligent as possible. Chapter 7 does an excellent job of covering the topics of alternate UIs, including Silverlight, Windows applications, and mobile applications. Chapter 8 is where the developer deep-dive starts with all the things you need to deal with CRM metadata, which is necessary knowledge for pretty much all developers that touch the CRM SDK. Chapter 9 covers all the details about how to use the CRM web services, including the most important topic of authentication, since CRM supports 4 seperate authentication mechanisms, depending upon the deployment model. Chapter 10 is full of useful programming tips that really did not fit in any previous chapter, but that all of us have to deal with on a regular basis. Chapters 11-14 deal with a progressive description of the CRM event model and how to develop custom plugins for the CRM. Chapters 15-21 deal with the workflow model, again in a very progressive manner, starting with the basics for customization and ending with common tips and techniques. Chapter 22 is dedicated to CRM Online and some of the things that you need to do that are different with that deployment model. Chapter 23 deals with the new capabilities of mult-language and multi-currency, which are very important for multi-national CRM customers. Chapter 24 covers how to package your customizations for deployments, and that is important for an ISV as well as a CRM integrator. Chapters 25 and 26 are all about low level tracing and performance issues, giving you the tools and techniques that you need to know to really support a live CRM environment. The author does an excellent job of covering all of the major areas in CRM development. I have quite often found that the solutions to the problems I am trying to solve are more easily solved in the book than using a web search. If you are a developer that is building on the CRM, ensure that you have this book in your personal library.

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