buildThing: Dynamics 365buildThing: Dynamics 365

buildThing: Dynamics 365 is one of the free open source tool, product or add ons that we produce at cloudThing. It's usually something we find useful that we think others in the tech community may benefit from.

buildThing: Dynamics 365 is a set of tasks which aim to allow a full ‘hands-off’ deployment of Dynamics CRM/365 for Customer Engagement release by cloning a known good master instance to a target instance.

Using the ThingsUsing the Things

You can use buildThing things in a build or release job in VSTS. Here's an example of a release pipeline, in which we've set up a chain of D365CE instances, in each of which we want to run a selection of buildThing things:

Then if as an example we drill down into the 'staging' environment, here's a set of tasks we might want to run there:

The last task in the list shows a typical config screen for a buildThing thing - in this case we have a configuration entity which stores a Google Maps API Key, and we want to substitute in the right one for this particular D365CE instance.

Version History

v0.0.1 Initial Preview ReleaseWe're using these tools every day in VSTS for v8.2 instances. They should work in TFS and with v8.1 and v9.0 of D365CE, but in all cases should only be considered as suitable for evaluation and feedback.

Open Source

We'll be releasing the code for these tasks on GitHub in due course.

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