So you’ve spent half a day downloading the latest re-released VPC of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 only to find that the Customer Portal and Partner Portal samples are broken.

For example, when you try to launch the Partner Portal (under xRM Portals in IE favorites bar) you get the following error message:

I’m certain Microsoft will post a fix soon but in the mean time I’ve done some digging and found a solution. The portal files are already deployed and you just need to point the IIS applications to the correct folders on your disk. On your VPC desktop you’ll find a shortcut named “Accelerators”, open it and you’ll find your portals.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Open IIS management console.

2. Expand Web Sites, right click Customer Portal and select Properties.

3. Under the Home Directory tab paste this path into the Local path field:

C:\Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0\Accelerators\CUSTOMER_PORTAL_RTW_R1\Installation\Website\Customer-Portal-R2\Website

4. Click Apply.

5. Now repeat steps 2-4 for the Partner Portal site. The path is:

C:\Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0\Accelerators\PARTNER_PORTAL_RTW_R2.01\Installation\Website\Partner-Portal-R2\Website

Hope this helps.

The password is stored in the following registry path:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\DialogPage\
UKDynamics.CrmExplorer.OptionsPageCustom

This may not be a big issue for many developers, even when an administrator user is used, since most developers usually know the administrator password or are administrators themselves at least on dev\test environments, but still this is something you should be aware of.

If you’re concerned about this and cannot connect to your CRM server using default credentials, you can simply leave the password field blank and switch to default credentials every time you’re done working with the toolkit. This will clear the password registry key until the next time you wish to connect.