Programming Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 (Developer Reference)

I purchased Sonoma’s first CRM book and thought it was particularly well written. Well, they followed suit here and wrote about as good of a CRM Development book as someone could write. I say that in all seriousness b/c I work for a prominent CRM consultancy and was thinking about writing a programming book myself. They beat me to it and they did such a good job on this it’d be hard to find something to gripe about.

First off, it’s 640 pages and there’s very little fluff. That’s a lot of content to write and the only way one could write on the subject this thoroughly is by first having a LOT of real-world experience.

But the size/exhaustive coverage isn’t the most impressive part, the relevancy and attention to detail are. When I first learned CRM for instance, Plugin testing was the bain of my existence. I stayed up several nights trying to code a ‘real’ tool to test with without having to unregister an existing plugin and go through trial and error. Not only do they include a Mock framework for testing (honestly, if you’re a CRM developer, their coverage of Plugins alone more than justifies the book’s cost) but they addressed pretty much every issue I can think of related to plugins.

Another thing that’s striking about the book is their attention to coding elegance. Going back to the plugin example for a second, their use of Custom attributes in support of the Plugin code they write is so elegant any .NET developer out there would have to give them credit for the implementation.

Now I’ll admit I am highly biased in this regard up front as I have been on the Workflow Foundation bandwagon since Workflow foundation came into existence.. but their coverage of Workflow is just plain awesome. Other implementation books only show workflow code as an afterthought if they touch it at all. Not here, they hit the subject straight on and covered the subject as well as anyone could in the space provided. Seriously. I don’t have my copy of the book in front of me but they go through about 6 or 7 in depth examples of creating Activity derivatives and each one is meaty. (As another aside, their code is very well organized and they don’t skimp on anything – they’re even meticulous with Regions for example – which don’t have any real effect on code performance but have a huge affect on readability when you’re going through their examples).

They also have quite a bit of coverage of custom .aspx pages. While the cool factor isn’t as high here, it has nothing to do with how they wrote it, plain old aspx just isn’t going to be as sexy as workflow activities. They deserve credit though for the examples they came up with as none of it ever gets boring.

The fact the book remains interesting (and let’s face it, covering the CRM API isn’t exactly the easiest thing to make exciting) and relevant is testimony to both their skill as authors and their real-world experience with CRM. The proofreading is impeccable as is the readability. Although there are several authors, it’s really hard to tell when there’s been a transition from one author to another.

In summary, hats off to the Sonoma team for putting a book this good together – they did a first class job from start to finish and their hard work is evident in pretty much every single page and every code example.

Great book on Microsoft CRM 4.0. It really walks you through the API from the ground up and gives you a good path to mastering the technology.