Have you ever faced a situation when you don’t know why your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement system behaves the way it does, or why your own plugins behave the way they do?If you have, this might be a good time to put a canary in your system.
– A what?
– A canary.
You know when we were manually laboring down the coal mines, it happened that drilling into the rock inadvertently let out poisonous gas. So we brought in cages with canary birds putting their life at stake, to save our coal miners’ lives. The canaries were signaling the content of the atmosphere long before the coal miners would detect something dangerous. They did this by suddenly being upside down, instead of happily chattering.
As a plugin developer of many years, I have added extra tracing to my plugins more times than I can count and sometimes even added steps for more messages than necessary, and I am sure most of you reading this post have too, in one way or another.
Continue reading “A canary in CRM”
If you want the full story – these are the articles describing the background and technology behind our tools:
Part I – Background and how our DevOps tools evolved before we knew about it
Part II – Automation of the build and deploy process using custom VSTS Build Tasks
Part III – Demo of complete build and release definitions taking you from A to Z
Part I – Background and how our DevOps tools evolved before we knew about it
Part II – Automation of the build and deploy process using custom VSTS Build Tasks
Part III – Demo of complete build and release definitions taking you from A to Z
After the first two articles we have now got a handful custom VSTS Build Tasks to help us take the build and deployment automation all the way. This final article demonstrates how we do that with VSTS builds and releases. Finally raising the questions of why we did all this and where to go from here.
Below is a sample of a full build process that not only builds and packs a new CRM solution, but updates the individual assemblies and webresources in DEV environment, exports solutions and data, and then publishes the files exported from DEV together with Shuffle Definitions and Package Definition, which is the resulting build artifact.
Continue reading “Build and Deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects using VSTS – part III”
Part I – Background and how our DevOps tools evolved before we knew about it
Part II – Automation of the build and deploy process using custom VSTS Build Tasks
Part III – Demo of complete build and release definitions taking you from A to Z In the previous article I described the background of our struggles with moving configuration data and later scripted export and import of solutions and the CRM Deployer tool. This article takes these features to the next level by packing those and some other missing features into custom VSTS Build Tasks.
We now had the tools we needed to automate the central parts of the build/deploy process. But it still involved lots of manual or script based steps. To describe it simply, the following steps were required to produce a full deploy of a Customer Solution (CS) that has a prerequisite in one of our Product Solutions (PS), assuming we wanted the latest available code and customizations for both PS and CS.
Some of the steps above would be possible to encapsulate a bit more with scripting or tailored tools, and some of them possible to perform using Microsoft’s Developer Toolkit, Jason Lattimer’s CRM Developer Extensions or Wael Hamze’s CI FrameWork. But with the legacy of our Shuffle and later the CRM Deployer, that both have well proven technology and still save us literally hundreds of hours every month, we decided to add the few missing pieces in our puzzle ourselves. Continue reading “Build and Deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects using VSTS – part II”
Part I – Background and how our DevOps tools evolved before we knew about it
Part II – Automation of the build and deploy process using custom VSTS Build Tasks
Part III – Demo of complete build and release definitions taking you from A to Z My hope is that these articles will inspire you to take your delivery process to the next stage by implementing automation through CI and what is usually called DevOps. If you are already there, these articles should provide an alternative solution, which may or may not suit your needs today, but might be worth considering.
Back in the days of CRM 4.0 we started delivering systems that were based more and more on generic configurable functionality. The benefit of having an automated way of delivering and moving configuration data between CRM environments was becoming increasingly obvious. This was long before utilities like the Configuration Migration Tool, so we started to draw the blueprints to develop the functionality we needed. Basically, what we needed was to grab a bunch of data from a source environment to persist it in a file, and later push it into another CRM organization.
Continue reading “Build and Deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects using VSTS – part I”