The past 3 months have been a freaking grinder. I’m finishing up another CRM integration project right now and am just now getting to a point where I can see some day light again.
The really cool part: I know CRM’s API’s really well. I’ve been writing plugins, workflows, workflow actions, WCF web-services. I’ve been doing jQuery and getting fairly good with the whole AJAX thing. Heck, I even get CSS sort of.
Probably to coolest thing though is that I have a new code smith template nearly done. This template when I finish it (there isn’t a lot left) basically creates a software factory that produces the integration service I built. All you have to do is point it at your CRM server’s metadata service, fill in a few options, pick the entities you need to integrate with and the template generates a visual studio project with the framework for you to work with. The CRM Dynamic Entity gets wrapped inside an entity that maps everything out. Lookups are either the instance of the entity or collections of entities depending upon the lookup type. Entity factories that load your entities based on whatever criteria you specify. With this framework in place writing plug-ins or WF activities is a snap.
I’m almost done and should have time to get it finished starting next week.