Hello, everyone:
I am preparing to begin work on a project involving Dynamics CRM and the development of some custom plug-ins (presumably in C#) for the same. Everyone on the project has a pretty solid programming background but we are new to Dynamics CRM and find the details of what we need somewhat scant.
I gather that we will need the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) installed, but we're having trouble finding out more about it. I gather that BIDS is an optional component that you can select during installation of SQL Server 2008/R2. However, as we will be using Dynamics CRM on-line rather than on-premesis I was under the impression that we wouldn't need to install SQL server on all of the development machines. Is there an alternate way to get BIDS without duplicating costs/installations/etc?
Further, I have read some info online that indicates that BIDS is just a trimmed down version of VS2008 with some additional templates. I currently have some older installations of Visual Studio as well the Express version of VS2008 and SQL Server 2008 Express (with which BIDS is not included).
Is it possible to create CRM add-ins (e.g. Online Fetch XML Reporting) using this setup - that is, can the BIDS Fetch Extension work with what I have, or will I need to upgrade? Given that we have CRM hosted online, can we get BIDS by itself without having to purchase full SQL Server software?
If it does require the purchase of additional software, what all will we need for development? It seems like upgrading to a full version of SQL server would yield BIDS and then we would be able to install the Fetch Authoring Extension - is that the case, or would we need to upgrade to a fuller version of VS also?
Thanks in advance.