I am new to CRM and I do not understand what the correct approach is to add my own custom pages. I have been building dialogs, workflows, adding my own ribbon buttons to execute them, etc. But I am hitting a limit with the dialog and workflows where I just want to build my own pages.
For example, I have a very complicated (50+ step) dialog and it is getting pretty annoying to maintain and the dialog just doesn't present things the way I want it to. So I am looking to see if I can create my own page that I can use to replace the dialog. I want to be able to call it from a button click on the ribbon, popup my own page, then have custom code that does everything I need to read from CRM, upload CRM, and send an email. I have been working with the REST services and it seems that I can use those to do everything that I need. But I don't really know. I haven't found something that actually tells me how to approach this in CRM 2011.
What I am missing is where to start. Does this require using VS.Net and building a plugin? Do I build the backend code in a plugin and add web resources for the pages? Then use javascript libraries to make calls to the plugin? I'm just not sure how this works and where to start. I've been looking for tutorials (Pluralsight.com and Google) but I haven't found anything that steps back and shows you how to go about this sort of customization.
Any thoughts, suggestions, or references are much appreciated.
Best regards,
Jon
Jon Gregory Rothlander