CRM 3.0, Entity Conversion done easy! Vb.Net
Ok, so your working with Microsoft CRM 3.0, right? And you have hundreds if not thousands of leads. You need to Qualify these leads, and Convert them to Accounts or Contacts. You’ve checked the Web API, but it doesn’t seem possible, or even easy… Well it is. After I spent countless hours surfing google, looking for an answer, I couldn’t find a good one. Here it is folks, and done in the wonderful world of VB instead of C#!
The first order of business is to create a new project, and add the Web Reference for CRM 3.0 to your project. It does not matter what type of project you create, winforms, console, asp.net. This is general VB code that will sit behind what ever interface you choose.
I will not cover CRM Web Reference addition to your project, you should be able to find that through google very easily, or know it before you attempt this :).
First import the CRM namespace. For the purposes of this write up our project is called ConsoleApplication1. And our WebReference is called CRM
Imports ConsoleApplication1.CRM
Next, we need to create an instance of the CRM service.
Dim oCrmService As New CrmService
Great! Now we are getting somewhere :). Lets follow it up by creating a function to return all of our Leads. We will be using FetchXML for this. This will return formatted XML, where you will be able to pull out all of your GUIDs from the LeadID field. The prefered method here, would be to load these into a XML document. I will write an XML memory document post later.
Dim fetch1 As String = _
'change [ and ] to < and > wordpress messed this up
“[fetch mapping='logical']” + _
“[entity name='lead']” + _
“[all-attributes/]” + _
“[/entity]” + _
“[/fetch]”
‘ Fetch the results. Into a String
Dim returnString1 = service.Fetch(fetch1)
To qualify the lead, we do it like this. Very short.
Dim oLead As SetStateLeadRequest = New SetStateLeadRequest 'create request for new change to the state of the lead
'qualify the lead
oLead.EntityId = LeadGUID ' This is the GUID from the fetch statement.
oLead.LeadState = LeadState.Qualified 'set the state of the lead to qualified
oLead.LeadStatus = -1 'not open anymore
oCrmService.Execute(oLead) 'execute the lead change
Now we need to Convert the Lead to an Entity of our Choice.
Dim oContact As InitializeFromRequest = New InitializeFromRequest 'create a request to make a contact
Dim oContactResponse As InitializeFromResponse = New InitializeFromResponse
Dim oContactObject As contact
'setup a entity
oContact.EntityMoniker = New Moniker
oContact.EntityMoniker.Id = LeadGUID
oContact.EntityMoniker.Name = "target entity as string"
oContact.TargetEntityName = TargetEntity
oContact.TargetFieldType = TargetFieldType.All 'target all the records on the lead entity to the target entity
'tell crm server to setup the entity
oContactResponse = oCrmService.Execute(oContact)
'tell crm to create and confirm the entity it setup
oCrmService.Create(oContactResponse.Entity)
Now as you see, this task is much easier than you thought! And there you have it, for you in VB.NET!
I would love this. If I could send a message from Jabber to my Wordpress blog and have it published. Perhaps I need to investigate XMPP more. 
Or just wish that someone else does it for me. Go internets!
I read yours! I love Codeweavers. They have for the FIRST time in a long time, enticed me to move away from Open-Source strict software, and pay for a product. Its that good. They save me time in management. I don’t HAVE a lot of time. I don’t want to mess with winecfg, I don’t wanna dink with X11. Well thats the thing, I can’t dink with X11 anyway, because hey OSX 10.5 ;-/ kinda screwed the pooch on that one.