Integration of Dynamics CRM 2011 solutions with TFS

Some weeks ago I was asked for a proof of concept to design a TFS 2010 solution to fully (not less than 100%) automate a complex Dynamics CRM 2011 deployment for various environments (dev / test / staging / production). Many different components were involved: the CRM solution itself, but also web applications, database objects, reports (SSRS), transformations, …

It has been an interesting journey so far and along the way I got to know (a bit) how Dynamics CRM 2011 is working. Not to my surprise, I realized that it’s quite hard to push all source related items to TFS and to force ALL changes/updates to a CRM environment from a version controlled solution in TFS. Many things in the CRM environment are easily modified by the development team via the CRM UI web interface and as result, directly stored in the CRM database(s). So, the POC also required me to think about enforcing best practices for the CRM development team to avoid inconsistencies in the global deployment solution and I definitly wanted to end up with a build-once;deploy-many solution.

Anyway, I won’t talk about the entire scope of the POC, but I want to highlight the approach I took for automating the export & extract operation from the development CRM 2011 instance via a TFS build definition. The goal here was to automatically capture the daily changes which were published to deployed CRM development solutions.

EXPORT
The MSCRM 2011 Toolkit contains a Solution Export command line utility which enabled me to export one or multiple CRM solutions from an existing Solutions Export Profile into a single compressed solution file (.zip).

EXTRACT
The compressed solution file (zip-format) is of course not ideal to track the individual changes and to bind it to a version control repository. Luckily, with the latest release of the Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK, a new tool (SolutionPackager) was added to extract the different components into individual files.

The SolutionPackager tool, available in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Update Rollup 10 version of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK download, resolves the problem of source code control and team development of solution files. The tool identifies individual components in the compressed solution file and extracts them out to individual files. The tool can also re-create a solution file by packing the files that had been previously extracted. This enables multiple people to work independently on a single solution and extract their changes into a common location. Because each component in the solution file is broken into multiple files, it becomes possible to merge customizations without overwriting prior changes. A secondary use of the SolutionPackager tool is that it can be invoked from an automated build process to generate a compressed solution file from previously extracted component files without needing an active Microsoft Dynamics CRM server.

So, these tools opened the door for me to work out a custom build process (workflow) in TFS 2010 with the following sequential activities:

• Export CRM solution from dev environment (MSCRM 2011 Toolkit)
• Prepare TFS workspace before extract of solution file [Get Latest + Check-Out]
• Extract compressed solution file into TFS workspace (SolutionPackager)
• Scan TFS workspace for changes/additions/deletions
• Check-In pending changes of the TFS workspace as a single changeset

The scan of the TFS workspaces — to end up with all differences [changes/additions/deletions] — was a bit more complex than expected because I needed to use several TFS API Workspace calls like PendEdit, PendAdd, PendDelete, … I also made use of the EvaluateCheckin2 method to detect potential conflicts and to perform proper exception handling.

This process allows the development team to easily follow-up the incremental changes (via TFS changesets) which were applied to the dev CRM environment. Note that the SolutionPackager tool is also able to generate a compressed solution file from the individual component files.