Dynamics 365 Finance + Operations (on-premises) Toolkit

This extension provides Azure DevOps release tasks for Dynamics 365 Finance + Operations (on-premises) version and Dynamics Lifecycle Services.

This extension is an unofficial one (it's not developed nor maintained by Microsoft). The extension is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. You can find the official extension here: Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Tools.

About

This extension and it's tasks are built reusing the logic in the official extension Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Tools.

Currently the only reason why this extension was created is to seperate Prepare and Apply update (Update environment) actions into two different tasks which can be run independently at different times. This extension is only our internal team's effort to simply make the release process for D365 FO on-premise environments just a little bit more flexible for ourselves. Therefore, if anyone else requires these kind of tasks - they are welcome to install this extension and use it.

Furthermore, we tried to keep the behaviour of the tasks as same as possible to the official task's (Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) Asset Deployment, where Type of asset is "Software deployable package for on-premises environments") behaviour. Also, apart from that there are a couple of technological differences which do not have any impact on the setup of the tasks but are worth mentioning:

The tasks are written in TypeScript which enables the tasks to run on any agent specification (Windows, Linux or macOS).
There's no need to install MSAL.PS while using this extension's tasks since the required MSAL dependency for authentication is already packed within the extension.

Using the tasks

Important! In order for this extension to work you must install the official Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Tools extension first. This is needed because the Azure DevOps Service connection type which is required is defined in the official extension.

After installing the offical extension and this extension, you can add tasks to new or existing release pipelines.

Finally, we provide some ideas on how these tasks could be consumed by leveraging Azure DevOps classic Release pipelines functionality. You can read the ideas here: setup ideas.

Extension tasks

LCS Asset Prepare (for D365 FO on-premise only) stars the Prepare of an asset against an on-premise D365 FO environment.
- This task only starts the Prepare against a D365 FO on-premise environment and sets a job scoped variable named preparationActivityId for later consumption. Keep in mind that the variable preparationActivityId is only accessible within the agent job's scope.
- This task is only available as a release pipeline task.
- It requires an LCS connection to be setup in the Azure DevOps project's service connections.

NOTE: you can review the known limitations, issues and setup details in the official extension's page Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations Tools.

LCS Apply Update (for D365 FO on-premise only) starts the Update environment against an on-premise D365 FO environment.
- This task only starts the Update environment action against a D365 FO on-premise environment. You must supply the Preparation Activity Id from the LCS Asset Prepare task in order for the task to work.
- This task is only available as a release pipeline task.
- This task requires an LCS connection to be setup in the Azure DevOps project's service connections.