We are just beginning development and implementation for dynamics crm 2011 on premises. Is it possible to implement automation for code check-in to promote code from development to test systems? It looks like this would involve export/import of unmanaged solutions containing the development code that was checked in. I have not been able to find APIs around this functionality.
If that is not possible, how close can you get? It looks like there are APIs to automate the uploading of web resources and plug-ins (e.g. webresourceutility in the sdk), but the web resources still need to be manually linked to the form they are to be used on (in the case of javascript etc). Has anyone made progress in automating parts of their CRM environments?
for reference, we're using vs 2010 & tfs 2010 using MSuild for current continuous integration.
We have a few techniques that provides us a very solid CI structure.
Plugins
All our Plugins are CI Compiled on Check-In
All plugin code we write has self-registration details as part of the component.
We have written a tool which plays the Plugins to the database, uninstalling the old ones first based on the self-registration
details.
Solution
We have an unmanaged solution in a Customisation organisation which
is clean and contains no data. Development is conducted out of this
organisation. It has entities, forms, Jscript, Views, Icons, Roles,
etc.
This Customisation database has all the solutions we've imported from 3rd parties, and customisations are made into our solution which is the final import into a destination organisation.
The Solution is exported as managed and unmanaged and saved into
TFS
We store the JScript and SSRS RDLs in TFS and have a custom tool
which plays these into the customisation database before it is
exported.
We also have a SiteMap unmanaged Solution which is exported as unmanaged (to ensure we get a final resultant Sitemap we are after)
Deployment
We have a UI and Command Line driven tool which does the following :-
Targets a particular Organisation
Imports the Customisation managed solution into a selected environment. e.g. TEST. Additionally imports the unmanaged Sitemap.
Uninstalls the existing solution which was there (we update the solution.xml file giving it a name based on date/time when we import)
Installs/Uninstalls the Plugin Code
Installs any custom SQL scripts (for RDLs)
Re-enables Duplicate Detection Rules
Plays in certain meta-data we store under source control. e.g. Custom Report entity we built which has attachments and XML configuration.
It isn't entirely perfect, but via command line we refresh TEST and all the Developer PCs nightly. It takes about 1 hour to install and then uninstall the old solution per organisation.
We use CI extensively for Dynamics CRM. For managing solutions, I would recommend using a "clean" Dynamics CRM implementation which will be the master for your solutions and also for your "domain data". See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.crm.sdk.messages.importsolutionrequest.aspx for importing solutions. Also check out - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh547388.aspx
Related
Let me start with telling that I'm not a Microsoft Dynamics CRM specialist. I only have experience with developing .NET solutions without CRM or SharePoint and some experience how to use continues deployment of TFS to release custom applications. But for a current assignment I start with developing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and I'm not alone.
Here we work with 2 scrum teams. Both have their own Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 environment and we use TFS to save our source code. Only source code, no configuration of CRM. When we release software, we need to manually merge the CRM configurations into a third environment (integration environment). This takes a lot of time and everything needs to be tested again.
I've searched on the internet and find a lot of content about customizing CRM but not how to work with multiple teams and get an automatic release pipeline for the changes both in code as in CRM.
Does anyone knows what the best practices is to develop a CRM solution with multiple teams and how to make a continues release pipeline to get the C# code and the CRM configuration automatically to the test, acceptation and production environments?
What I have done was to use the solution packager. The scrum teams would develop against their CRM instances and in a specific solutions.
They can then (either automatically using scripts and the CRM API or manually) export the solution and extract it to a version control friendly format.
This can then be committed to the version control system and then (using an automated build) get repackaged and versioned and ultimately deployed to a integration CRM instance as a managed package.
The use of managed vs un-managed packages is a bit more lengthy topic though
Is there any way of exporting Test Cases and Shared Steps from one project to another in TFS 2012 using database queries?
I have tried TFS Integration tool, but it did not work as I expected, so I was wondering if there is any way of doing this by connecting to SQL Server and exporting all items directly from and to the databases.
A few days ago I needed an Excel testcase export for a newer version of TFS (TFS 2013). Turns out that there is still no export to Excel function built-in to TFS (in contrast to E-Mail and Printing) and the tools became incompatible over time.
But I found this Revival-Tool that seems to work:
https://github.com/jorupp/ExportTestCases
Just wanted to point that out even if it may not be directly related to this topic with TFS2012.
You shouldn't work directly in the database, because it is not supported by Microsoft and you could harm it a lot.
I used the TFS Integration Platform tools a lot for migrating TFS2010 projects, but never used it for TFS2012. My experience with that were good and it shouldn't be a problem to migrate all Test Cases and Shared Steps into another TeamProject. If you have the same Work Item Type Definitions in both projects, you don't need to create field mappings.
Another option would be to use Excel as "Export" and "Import" cache, but you might loose some information, because not everything could be shown in Excel, e.g. Steps of a TestCase, the history, Work Item Links.
If you are skilled in programming using TFS API, you could write your own small migrator, but this could be a lot of effort.
All in all the TFS Integration Platform should be the easiest and best way, so what have been your expectations that have not been fulfilled?
You can use an alternative methods.
First export all Test cases using "Test case extractor."
Them import them in new project using "Test case import tool."
Adding to the point mentioned above, for exporting the test cases you might find the below link more useful:
http://tfstestcaseexporttoexcel.codeplex.com/
I have given it a try and found it very useful and easy to use.
I have several websites that I manage for a company and they want me to transition to TFS. As part of their policy, I can only deploy files that have changed since the last deployment. I.e. if a view has changed then it gets deployed, if it has not changed then it not part of the deployment package. They use automated tools for the deployments.
Currently I use a custom tool I wrote that hooks into my local source provider (Vault Pro) and finds all the changes from a given date and copies those files to a zip file.
How can I accomplish something similar with Team Foundation Server?
TFS provides you with an SDK that you could use to query it from code. Here's the documentation of the client API.
I'm trying to set up a TFS server for our small dev team, and since this is fairly new to me I have a couple of questions.
1) We are developing ASP.Net websites for internal use (intranet etc), these websites currently are not saved with visual studio solutions, they get saved basically as they are on the server and we just update them using Visual Studio by doing file > open website.
So my first question is should I save these as solutions in TFS? What would the benefit of this be?
Im coming from a background of developing WPF applications and have always seen everything saved with a solution in TFS.
2) What should we store in our TFS repository (and what should we exclude)?
At the moment I am storing source code & Documentation but is it really appropriate to store things like installers for VS plugins / small applications or should this kind of thing all be placed on a server someplace?
So my first question is should I save these as solutions in TFS? What
Yes, you could create a solution containing the different ASP.NET web applications.
would the benefit of this be?
Your source code will be version controlled
What should we store in our TFS repository
Source code, third party assemblies that your ASP.NET applications might require, script files, basically everything that allow to get your site up and running. Documentation should also be stored along with the project. Same stands for installers (the source code only, not the MSI) if those installers allow to deploy the ASP.NET application on the live servers.
and what should we exclude
Compiled assemblies, but they are automatically excluded by TFS anyway.
I am pretty new to TFS but I have some experience with VSS. I like to know your opinions of what would be the best way of working with TFS in the following scenario:
We are a group of developers working on projects. All projects starts from a common base code. All projects are one man only, no code sharing until the project is done. A project can last from a few hours to several months, no code is merged until done. Any developer works simultaneously on more than one project, usually 7-10 projects at a time. Usually the projects only involve a small numbers of files that are changed/created (10-20) but rely on a large group of infrastructure files that change quite often. However, any change in infrastructure is not considered until the merge, so we don't get latest version from server until the final build.
An additional request is that, when merged, we’d like to use a 3 way merge tool. We use this approach in VSS, via a custom made application and it works very well. However this involves special file management, for example every file that has to be changed must have an original version saved somewhere that will be used as the “root” file for the 3 way merge process.
What do you think?
You should take a look at the Visual Studio TFS Branching Guide 2010. (direct download). In that package, there is a PowerPoint deck that walks you through a series of possible branching structures.
It sounds like you want either "Branch by project" or "Branch by developer" (since you only have one developer per project, these are effectively the same).
Regarding the 3-way merge tool, take a look at this list to see how to configure your favorite diff/merge tools.