jonas rapp: Build and Deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects using VSTS – part I

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Источник: http://jonasrapp.innofactor.se/2017/04/DevOps-I.html
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During my eight years as a Microsoft Dynamics CRM / 365 developer, I have felt a strong pain every time it was time to package and distribute a customer or product implementation.

Over the years our tools have evolved to now support a complete automated process; from source repository via compilation, updating dev environment, exporting solutions and configuration, collecting the artifacts and compose deployment packages to be installed manually or by VSTS release management.

This is the first article of three telling the tale of our own DevOps for Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the technology behind it.

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.

 

It started with the data

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.

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Источник: http://jonasrapp.innofactor.se/2017/04/DevOps-I.html