Extending Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portals with custom server-side code

Dynamics 365 Portals have gone through some significant changes since Microsoft acquired Adxstudio in 2015.

When Microsoft released their first post-acquisition version of the Portals in Spring 2016 (known as version 8), it included fewer features than the last Adxstudio version (version 7). Some of the more popular features that weren't included in the new version include e-commerce, event management, and SharePoint integration. Since that time, Microsoft has been hard at work on Portals, including adding exciting features like faceted search, dashboards, and charts. Unfortunately, many of the features that did not make it into version 8 are still not there.

From a developer perspective, however, the biggest change has been the transition of Portals to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, meaning Microsoft hosts the code on your behalf using Azure. This approach is great because the management of the hosting infrastructure is taken care of for you; however, the downside is that we can no longer add custom .NET code directly into the project. We typically use custom .NET code to read and write data using the CRM SDK, or to interact with another API like SharePoint or a payment processor.

Interacting with CRM data out of the box

The foundation of a Portals application is interacting with CRM data, including reading or writing data.

The out-of-the-box Portals do have some powerful tools that tie it to CRM. The Entity Lists and Entity Forms capabilities make it simple to build web applications very quickly. However, in terms of user interface design, their flexibility is limited. In our experience, there are many cases where Entity Lists and Entity Forms are a great fit, but there are also many cases where they don't provide the user experience the client ...