Creating Environment independent solutions

When developing a solution for CRM, make sure that it runs on all different crm environments. Many implementations have their CRM installation on another port compared to the development environments. A way to handle this, is to look at the location of MS CRM as it is stored in the registery.

// Set default values
private const string CRM_REG_DIRECTORY = @"software\Microsoft\mscrm\";
private const string CRM_SERVICE_PATH = @"/2006/crmservice.asmx";

// Create CrmService instance
service = new CrmService();
service.Url = GetCRMWebServiceRoot() + CRM_SERVICE_PATH;

/// <summary>
/// Returns the recorded web location from the registry
/// </summary>
private static string GetCRMWebServiceRoot()
{
string result = null;
try
{
RegistryKey regKey = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(CRM_REG_DIRECTORY, false);
if (regKey != null)
{
result = (string) regKey.GetValue("ServerUrl");
}
else
{
throw new ApplicationException("Microsoft CRM could not be found on this computer.");
}
}
catch (Exception err)
{
throw new ApplicationException("Cannot retrieve registry value for CRM web service. " + err.Message);
}
return result;
}

Thanks to Richard McCormick for providing the codes :)