One of the primary sources of traffic to my blog comes from my CRM 4 Grid Editor utility. Every day, it seems, some new visitor lands on my blog (according to Google Analytics) looking for this project. It seems to me, then, that the sooner I can update the utility to work with CRM 2011, the less disappointed these visitors may be.
First and foremost, I’d like to make a solemn announcement: I will no longer continue development on the CRM 4 Grid Editor. It’s reign started rather late in the CRM 4 life-cycle, and now that we’re well into CRM 2011’s life-cycle, I don’t see much benefit from continuing to develop it. For those who patiently waited for many bug fixes and feature enhancements, I apologize. Regular readers of this space know why I had to drop the project at the beginning of the year, and the unfortunate side-effect culminates with this announcement.
All is not for naught, however, as I intend to start very soon on the CRM 2011 Grid Editor update. In light of the experience I’ve had with implementers of the CRM 4 version, I’ve come to a few design decisions about the update that will impact the product overall:
- I will no longer “hack” the CRM Grid control in an unsupported fashion.
- I will no longer reuse CRM input controls in an unsupported fashion.
- I will provide all of the feature enhancements and bug fixes that I had originally intended for the CRM 4 Grid Editor.
Understandably, these decisions will impact the total amount of time necessary to develop this project—but I may not be alone. Finally, I may actually have some help from interested contributors within the ranks of Microsoft. This kind of collaboration excites me, because it means that the turn-around for development could be much quicker and the end-result should be more uniform with the overall CRM experience.
The purpose of this announcement is to solicit comments from you about the features you would like to see from this effort, and the relative importance you might place upon them. If you’ve used the CRM 4 Grid Editor, then you’ll be in a good position to know what has already been accomplished. If not, however, I still want to hear your feedback.
So, kick me some comments below in this early, planning phase of the project so I can give appropriate consideration to the needs of the Dynamics CRM community.
