Phil Edry’s Dynamics CRM Blog

A quick lunch break “gotcha” post before I forget:

Have you ever tried to create a new instance of a crm entity via the SDK only to find that none of your custom attributes (or custom entities for that matter) are showing up in your intellisense? What’s worse, you get a compiler error when try to build because your “new_” prefixed attribute isn’t a recognized member of the class (something like: ’<CrmSdk>.<entity>’ does not contain a definition for ‘new_<custom_attribute>’)?

Well, if you added the web reference to the SDK before you added/published your customizations in CRM, you’ll need to “Update Web References” in Visual Studio before it will compile.

To do this:

1. Go to the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio and expand your project.
2. Right-click your “App_WebReferences” or your specific web reference to the CRM SDK and select “Update Web References.”

 -p

Ever tried adding a column to a view that is a lookup to a user in Dynamics CRM 4.0? You’ll notice a mysterious checkbox titled “Enable presence for this column”. Now, if you google “Enable presence for this column”, you get nothing (well until I wrote this entry.) So what the heck does this feature do?

Turns out, it’s a neat new feature of Dynamics CRM 4.0. Now, if you’re signed into Communicator or Windows Live Messenger, the online status circle icon will appear next to users’ names in the view.

 See the below msdn blog for more details.

-p

References: http://blogs.msdn.com/lezamax/archive/2008/01/11/crm-4-0-presence.aspx