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Write less code with CRM Helper classes...........

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Building an extremely developer friendly programming experience is a challenge, when you are working within the constraints of WSDL programming model. Basically, a WSDL programming model does not allow you to describe code/functions (e.g. user friendly constructors). All you can put in a WSDL described programming model is data types (and a bunch of other contract stuff like messages, method signatures, etc). Tools like Visual Studio generate code from the type definitions in WSDL and give you the default constructors, class hierarchy and all the cool IntelliSence support.

So in Microsoft Dynamics CRM V3.0, we wanted to have best of both worlds. We wanted to have a WSDL based programming model that gives you all the benefits of such model but at the same time provide rich programming experince that enables a developer to write less code when programming against our web services.

That is why we added a number of optional helper classes (e.g. CRMSDKHelpers.cs, QueryExpressionHelper.cs) to our SDK package that you can add to your development project. These helpers classes basically help you write less code, hence you can develop CRM solutions faster and at a lower cost.

A good example is the helper classes that we have added for QueryExpression(QE). QE is a new class that allows you to build data queries in CRM using C# and get strongly typed Business Entities (or DynamicEntities, your choice) back from our platform. If you reference our WSDLin your project, you can take full advantage of QueryExpression, however, if you also add the QueryExpressionHelper.cs classes to your Visual Studio project, you will end up writing up to 50% less code than the WSDL only scenario.

So the message here is to check out the classes that are postfixed with "Helper(s)" in the SDK Samples.zip that you can find in our latest SDK package......

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