I'm currently in the final stage of releasing version 4.1 of the Filtered Lookup and it will be the best filtered lookup ever. I had to postpone most other activities because of this, but I have created a second video showing another highlight of the upcoming Professional Edition of the Stunnware Tools application.

The Code Generator

A big disadvantage when working with the Microsoft CRM SDK assemblies, is that you have to use dynamic entities most of the time. While the DynamicEntity class was enhanced to make it easier to use, you're losing a lot of benefits you had when using the web services:

• Type and property checking: You don't know at compile time if your code is correct, because you are not using strongly typed classes and you don't access named properties.
• Intellisense: because of the above, you also don't get any context-sensitive help while developing in Visual Studio
• You have to use the more complex RetrieveRequest and RetrieveMultipleRequest messages with the Execute method instead of the Retrieve and RetrieveMultiple methods.

All in all your code becomes more complex and it takes more time to develop and test.

The professional edition introduces a code generator that gives you back everything you lost plus some additional benefits:

• Works with the CrmService class and the ICrmService interface from the Microsoft CRM SDK assemblies
• Creates C# and VB.NET code
• Creates classes for all or selected entities, providing nullable properties for easy access
• All attribute names in each class are defined as constant strings, so you never have to look at CRM again to remember the correct spelling
• Creates enumerations for all picklists, state and status attributes
• Adds methods for easy use of the CRUD operations (Create, Retrieve, RetrieveMultiple, Update, Delete)
• Adds methods to change an entity's state
• Provides easy management of all reference types (Lookup, Owner, Customer), e.g. you write account.Primarycontactid = myContact.ToReference()
• Allows you to create your own code generation templates. If you want some special methods in every class, then simply add it to the template files.

Documentation of this tool will take some time and I'm probably releasing it before having finished it, because the application itself is done.

The video

Here's a short video showing the code generation process (pretty easy). It requires the Adobe Shockwave Player to be installed on your machine though. It's again without any audio, so don't blame your speakers or headphones. Have to buy a micro... 

I'm using the code generator myself and the video shows the generation of the classes I'm using in the Filtered Lookup add-on. I have to provide a better video, showing more code, but I hope you get the point anyway.