Documenting a Dynamics CRM custom workflow activity with Doxygen

In this post I will show how to document a Dynamics CRM 2011 custom workflow activity assembly and use Doxygen to generate a compiled HTML (CHM) help file. (Doxygen can actually generate documentation in a variety of different formats, but I'm partial to CHM files because they're entirely self-contained.) For »

Posting/processing JSON in a Dynamics CRM 2011 custom workflow activity

With the proliferation of RESTful APIs, JSON is frequently used as a message format for interoperability. My MSDN "Posting/processing JSON in a CRM 2011 custom workflow activity" code sample shows how to POST JSON messages to a REST endpoint and process the response in a Dynamics CRM »

Sending SMS messages and making robocalls from Dynamics CRM

In this post I will show how to send SMS messages and make automated phone calls from Dynamics CRM using Tropo, a cloud voice and SMS messaging API. Tropo is not the only player in this space, but I think it has the best set of features, and it's completely »

An overview of environments to support Dynamics CRM development

In my current Dynamics CRM project, I am the solution architect for a new initiative that was set up as a "mini-project" separate from the existing CRM solution's production support and feature enhancement teams. We had our own PM, testing team, business analysts and developers. As we approach »

In which we explore unsupported Dynamics CRM database operations

If you work with Dynamics CRM long enough, I can almost guarantee you will one day encounter a problem where a direct SQL insert/update/delete (DML) against your CRM database is either the only possible solution or the alternatives are so cumbersome as to make the direct SQL approach »