Dynamics CRM migration from 3.0 to 4.0 resources

Question

We are about to embark on migrating our CRM 3.0 installation to CRM 4.0. We have a lot of custom entities, and have written a lot of code using the web service SDK, Stored Procs hitting the views in SQL for the entities, and even some Workflow and Callout DLLs. While I'm certainly not going to miss the .Net 1.1 development environment of the Workfows and Callouts, I am apprehensive about what's going to bite us hidden away in bowels of CRM. I have not had any experience with 4.0 at all.

My current gut feel is that this is either going to be fairly simple, or completely painful, with no middle ground.

Google searches have not turned up any good references, so I'm going to ask here:

Does anyone have any pointers, either links to resources, books to recommend, or even personal experiences that will ease the pain of transition?

Answer 1

There are a few gotchas, but first things first and visit this link. That's a Microsoft article that discuses upgrading to 4.0.

I've done about a dozen upgrades and most go smooth but here are a few things to consider:

• Are you moving to a multi-tenancy environment? If so you'll need to rewrite your callouts to plugins.

• If you have a large code-base, you should find any references to these deprecated classes or these deprecated messages

• Are you currently on Server 2000 or SQL Server 2000? Neither is supported

• There are a list of items that will NOT be upgraded and these may or may not be relevant to you.

I'd try and provide some more info but without knowing more about your system I wouldn't know where to begin. All in all, though, the move from 3.0 to 4.0 is HUGE from an admin/developer's perspective. I'm sure you'll enjoy the new system.