/dyn365-ce-devops

DevOps for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE) is becoming a popular topic. The goal of this project is to help Dynamics 365 CE solution builders understand and accelerate their implementation of DevOps practices with Dynamics CE and VSTS.

MIT LicenseMIT

Introduction

Please watch the following video to get a high level overview of this project:

Video Introduction

The project provides reference examples of using Visual Studio Team Service (VSTS) to build and deploy Dynamics 365 based applications. The reference examples are based on various use cases, including:

The intent of this project is to evolve (over time) to implement additional reference examples based on common and/or requested use cases. Lessons learned from this project have resulted in contributions back to https://github.com/waelHamze/xrm-ci-framework/ and https://github.com/scottdurow/SparkleXrm/wiki/spkl. Please feel free to suggest new scenarios / starter templates or other ideas via the issues section.

These release templates point to a sample application that spans Dynamics 365 & Azure. The source code that will be built and deployed by VSTS is available at: https://github.com/devkeydet/CrmAsyncRequestResponseSampleV2

The source code in the repository above shows how to source control both code and configurations associated with a Dynamics 365 demo/poc/sample.

The reference build definitions show two different build scenarios:

  • Primary Build.json - shows how to use VSTS to:
    • Build assets from a remote GitHub repository
      • This, of course, could be done from a VSTS repository as well depending on whether the source code should be public or private
    • Build all the assets from source control into their deployable form
      • Reports unit test pass/fail for both .net and javascript code as part of build reporting
      • Reports code coverage of unit tests
      • Minifies JavaScript using Gulp
      • Solution package zip files
      • Starter data import zip files
      • .NET dlls for both Dynamics 365 and an Azure Function App
      • etc.
  • Patch Build.json - shows how to use VSTS to:
    • Build a simple patch from source control

The reference release definitions show how to deploy assets from the build to the target environment(s). Each does the following:

UI Automation Testing

The source code of the sample application has a project called UIAutomationTests, which uses https://github.com/microsoft/easyrepro to demonstrate how perform automated UI testing for Dynamics 365. However, the tests are not yet incorporated into a release as a predeployment quality gate. There is a known issue when using https://github.com/microsoft/easyrepro with the phantomjs driver for headless test execution. Therefore, we cannot run the UI automation tests using the hosted VSTS agent. The hosted agent doesn't have browsers installed. The workaround today is to deploy your own agent. Doing so would allow you to install a browser and use one of the selenium browser drivers. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/build-release/test/continuous-test-selenium for more details.

Getting Started

Prereqs

  1. Primary Build.json requires several VSTS extensions to fully function. Before beginning please install the following extensions.

Step by Step

Please watch the following videos to help you understand how to get started:

Part I - This video walks through Primary Build.json and Primary Release - Dynamics Only.json, with a goal of helping you understand how they work and how to import them into your own VSTS project.

Video walkthrough part one

Part II - This video assumes you watched Part I. It builds on Part I, with a goal of helping you understand how to import and execute Primary Release - Dynamics + Azure.json, which includes a more elaborate example, including provisioning, deploying and configuring Azure services and code that work as part of the overall application.

Video walkthrough part two