What's New in v4.

XrmToolkit v4 has been built from the ground up to better facilitate the ability to add new features more quickly and to take advantage of many of the language improvements in C# over the last several years.

Official support for CRM 2016

With the new release comes official support for CRM 2016.

Generate early bound classes using CrmSvcUtil

You can now choose to generate early bound classes utilizing the CrmSvcUtil library. Simply choose this method when generating your proxy classes. For more information see the documentation here

Proxy Classes Now Support the CRM Linq Query Provider

You can now use the Proxy classes just like the early bound classes generated by the CrmSvcUtil. For more information regarding the LINQ provider please see the documentation here.

New Wizard for creating Plugins and Workflows

For more information see the documentation here.

Support for using Gulp with TypeScript, JavaScript, Html, CSS, LESS, SASS (scss) and XML files.

You can now optionally specify a Gulp task to run prior to publishing your web resources to CRM. If your Gulp task produces an output file that should be used as the source file for the web resource, then you can specify this file as the file to be published to CRM. For more information see the documentation here.

Bulk Link Items to CRM

You can now easily link an existing Visual Studio project and its items to assets in CRM. For more information see the documentation here.

Improved Plugin and Workflow Templates

Both the plugin and workflow templates have been improved greatly to allow you to quickly write your business logic without worrying about the plumbing behind the scenes. The concept of a 'LocalContext' is used to take care of the common functions for creating and accessing things such as the ITracingService, IOrganizationContext, Pre and Post images, and the message target entity or entity reference:

Transfer links between different CRM organizations

When linking a solution to an additional organization, you will be prompted to transfer any links from another organization. You can also manually invoke this dialog from the solution level commands. This allows you to quickly link an additional CRM Organization without needing to manually link all the same files to the new organization.

Easily transfer plugin configurations between organizations and save to version control

Once the plugin configuration file has been downloaded into Visual Studio, you can double click on it to open/view/register the plugin, steps and images using the plugin registration tool:

Improved CRM Linq query provider

Included is a new Linq Query Provider for CRM that adds the following capabilities:

• Ability to specify which columns to return. This is helpful if you need 'Read-only' properties like 'Created On' or 'Modified On' to be returned.
• Ability to create 'In' or 'Not In' queries.
• Ability to create queries with 'IsNotNullOrEmpty' or 'IsNullOrEmpty'.
• Ability to create simple aggregate queries like 'Sum', 'Min', 'Max', 'Count', and 'Average' including the use of 'Grouping'.
• Ability to create a left outer join for querying records where something is NOT present. For example, query contacts that have not had any activities in the last 30 days.
• Ability to query based on the 'Id' property instead of first knowing what the name of the Id field is. This is helpful when using late bound entities.

For more details see the documentation here.

Compare Your Local File to CRM

You can easily compare your local Visual Studio file with what is stored in CRM by clicking a single button:

For more details see the documentation here.

Ability to specify all report properties

You can now specify all the properties when uploading or editing the report.

Misc

• Publish the currently open document - A right-click menu in has been added in code window for JavaScript, TypeScript and Html for publishing the file to CRM. This allows you to setup a keyboard shortcut for publishing. For more information see the documentation here.
• Ability to link a file without first linking the project.
• Ability to create plugin configurations without first registering them. This allows you to setup all your plugin configuration and then register everything at once.
• Ability to download the 'DLL' of any plugin registered in the database.
• Ability to see what other steps are registered for the same entity and message. This allows you to determine the order that plugins are executed in the pipeline very easily.
• Proxy classes now implement both the INotifyPropertyChanging and INotifyPropertyChanged interfaces
• Proxy classes are now 'Partial' classes allowing you to easily extend them if necessary.