CRM 2011 – How to add crmsvcutil to the External tools menu in Visual Studio

I am loving the CRM 2011 early bound functionality.  The one draw back is it you have to run the crmsvcutil quite often if you are adding/removing fields from your entities.

If you want to see a quick example of using the crmsvcutil to generate you classes check this blog out

simple crmsvcutil example

In visual studio under the tools menu there is an External Tools section where you can call exe’s, pass them some variables and run them.  crmsvcutil is a prime candidate for that.

so go to the Tools/External Tools

Click Add

Give it a cool title like – Awesome crmsvcutil tool

in the command you need to specify the location of the crmsvcutil.exe

here is mine – C:\Hosk Stuff\crm\CRM2011\sdk\bin\crmsvcutil.exe

in the arguements you put in the arguements you want to pass to crmsvcutil.exe

/url:http://crmserver:5555/crmorganisationname/xrmServices/2011/Organization.svc /out:earlyboundclasses.cs /username:hosk /password:Hoskspassword

finally you specify the initial directory which is where you want the output to go

C:\

I just put in on the c drive for now.

So there we go, it should be such a choir to build your early bound classes any more.