Understanding the different ways to connect to CRM 2011

Question

I'm a beginner CRM developer and I'm quite confused about the connection methods to CRM.

What's the difference between creating a SOAP service reference to connect to CRM 2011 from a windows form application VS using connection string VS creating a web service?

Are they the same and I can use them interchangeably ? Or it depends on the task I want to do?

Thanks

Answer 1

Out of the 3 links that you have provided, one contains the best approach.

this - CRM SDK says to use this approach when you want to connect with CRM from some other application like Winform app, WPF app, website. In summary, you provide connection values through configuration and then use dlls provided by CRM to access data.

this - This is a special case in CRM. So here you are accessing some data from CRM, processing it in a service and then using that service to access processed data.

this - This document itself says that you should not use this approach. Problem with this approach is about hard coded service references.

You can find plenty of examples to start up with from CRM SDK.