Skip to main content

Notifications

Announcements

No record found.

News and Announcements icon
Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Portal Late Binding
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Portal Late Binding

(0) ShareShare
ReportReport
Posted on by ChrysDW

Hello~

My company hired a vendor to develop a web portal for us using ASP.Net MVC 4. My question is in reference to the developer using late binding vs early binding. Apparently, the developer did not use the crmsvcutil or Visual Studio's plugin for the CRM Code Generator Template to incorporate the schema from CRM.  I'm not a Sr. .Net developer myself but I have concerns about having to maintain the portal, enhancements, etc. I feel that if there are changes within CRM, then there could be some difficulties with updating the code within the portal. What, if any, concerns should I have with the late binding vs early? The project is already behind schedule, so to rework would be difficult unless I know there is a real concern.

Thank you so much in advance,
ChrysDW

*This post is locked for comments

  • ChrysDW Profile Picture
    ChrysDW on at
    RE: Portal Late Binding

    Thank you all for the answers. They all make sense. You have validated my concerns. After working through this project and doing a code review, I have to say that I would much much rather use early bound due to the misspellings of the fields, which cause a MAJOR headache and the lack of intellisense.  Having to rerun the crmsvcutil (or the CRM Code Template Generator) is way easier than having to hunt down misspelled fields. I do agree that it is a personal preference and this has definitely shown me that my preference is early bound.

    Thank you everyone!!

  • Verified answer
    Alan Mervitz Profile Picture
    Alan Mervitz 295 on at
    RE: Portal Late Binding

    Early-bound works well if you can consistently generate the code after schema changes, and like the developer productivity gained from it - e.g. intellisense, compile-time checking of fields matching your schema.

    Early-bound doesn't work well when your codebase needs to work when only subsets of the entire schema are installed - i.e. you have multiple solutions which your generated code was based on, but not all of them have to be installed in the CRM. What happens then is if you only install a subset of solutions, then generate the code, a lot of your code that depends on the generated code will not compile anymore.

  • Verified answer
    ThomasN Profile Picture
    ThomasN 3,190 on at
    RE: Portal Late Binding

    Hi ChrysDW, thanks for reaching out.

    I am not going to judge another consultants work, I am sure someone is looking at something I have done and wondering "why".

    Of course performing a simple search will return several blogs from others on the pros and cons of Late vs. Early bound types. I have a posted a simple blog from this community below that breaks it down.

    community.dynamics.com/.../microsoft-dynamics-crm-early-vs-late-binding-advantage-and-disadvantage

    In my experience, I thought early bound was great and used it for a portal implementation, however as the code grew in complexity and at the same time we were configuring Dynamics the early bound was difficult to keep current. With early bound you have to run the CrmSvcUtil every time to get changes. But if you have developers new to working with Dynamics SDK it could be worth it. I recommend late bound now for majority of projects because we know how to work with SDK and that development is not dependent on the configuration changes within Dynamics.

    Hope this helped.

Under review

Thank you for your reply! To ensure a great experience for everyone, your content is awaiting approval by our Community Managers. Please check back later.

Helpful resources

Quick Links

December Spotlight Star - Muhammad Affan

Congratulations to a top community star!

Top 10 leaders for November!

Congratulations to our November super stars!

Tips for Writing Effective Suggested Answers

Best practices for providing successful forum answers ✍️

Leaderboard

#1
André Arnaud de Calavon Profile Picture

André Arnaud de Cal... 291,280 Super User 2024 Season 2

#2
Martin Dráb Profile Picture

Martin Dráb 230,235 Most Valuable Professional

#3
nmaenpaa Profile Picture

nmaenpaa 101,156

Leaderboard

Featured topics

Product updates

Dynamics 365 release plans