Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is really a beautiful thing – with a few very annoying exceptions, it is a very flexible, easy to use, easy to customize business application development platform. It includes a comprehensive Web Service that allows you to perform pretty much any UI task programmatically.

There is one problem though – the CrmService proxy class can take upwards of 7 seconds just to initialize the class. Before a singe bit is passed from client to server, you have to wait for the .NET runtime to build the ginormous XmlSerializers for the equally ginormous Web service.

Normally Sgen.exe can be used to improve the startup time of Web Services, but for some reason the CRM Service doesn’t always get along with pregenerated XmlSerializers.

The solution: remove all those unused entities! My organization’s current CRM instance has 192 entities, which translates into (at least) 1,616 separate classes in the generated proxy code.
I have built a tool that consumes a CRM 4.0 web service wsdl, and produces a nice packaged .dll (complete with embedded XmlSerializers) with practically all the unnecessary fluff removed. The produced dll fully supports Fetch and the DynamicEntity – just no static types.

On a .net IIS server, creating a new CrmService now takes 0.12 seconds – instead of 6+.

Update: Released! You can get it on Codeplex here:
http://crmservicegenerator.codeplex.com/