Early Bound

<optional namespace>.Account, <optional namespace>.Contact, etc.

The code generation tool (CrmSvcUtil) creates early-bound entity classes, derived from the Entity class, that you can use to access business data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. These classes include one class for each entity in your installation, including custom entities.

Use this method when you want to have the compiler check type references at compile time. Also, attributes and relationships are included in the generated class, so they have IntelliSense support for entity, attribute, and relationship names. Using strong types is generally the preferred method and is used in the majority of samples in this SDK documentation.

There are some downsides to this approach:

Classes must be regenerated each time entities are customized to take advantage of schema changes.

Serialization costs increase as the entities are converted to late bound types during transmission over the network.

Use the Early Bound Entity Classes in Code

Create Early Bound Entity Classes with the Code Generation Tool (CrmSvcUtil.exe)

Late Bound

Microsoft.Xrm.Entity

The Entity class contains the logical name of an entity and a property-bag array of the entity’s attributes. This lets you use late binding so that you can work with types such as custom entities and custom attributes that were not present when your application was compiled.

Another benefit of this is that less serialization occurs as entity data is transmitted over a network, which means higher performance.

There are some downsides to this approach:

Types must be explicitly specified to prevent implicit casts.

It is harder to isolate the impact of changes to the schema because the names for resources, such as entities and attributes, are hardcoded.

Spelling mistakes while coding are easier to make because the attribute names are hardcoded strings.

Use the Late Bound Entity Class in Code