Common Data Service for Apps (CDS) is built on a solution architecture that is the key component to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for business applications on the Microsoft Power Platform. The solution architecture serves a majority of components but aren’t the only components in modern solution delivery. Configuration data, stored in the system, is becoming more critical to the operation of solutions both for ISV based products and individual based solutions.
For development teams to implement good ALM practices and continuous integration/delivery they need to have processes and tools to help setup a successful workflow of all components, solutions and configuration data.
Learn about techniques to achieve developer isolation for team development of CDS based solutions and fully automate build and release management with Azure DevOps Pipelines.
The presentation, “ALM Practices for Building Common Data Service Products and Services”, that accompanies this project can be found in the /docs folder of the example project on GitHub.
This example and the work done around it could not be completed without the outstanding community tools from various open source authors.
Open Source Projects Utilized
Dynamics 365 Build Tools by Wael Hamze
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=WaelHamze.xrm-ci-framework-build-tasks
https://github.com/WaelHamze/dyn365-ce-vsts-tasks
https://waelhamze.wordpress.com/
Adoxio.Dynamics.DevOps by Alan Mervitz
https://github.com/Adoxio/Adoxio.Dynamics.DevOps
https://alanmervitz.com
Microsoft.Xrm.Data.PowerShell by Sean McNellis & Kenichiro Nakamura
https://github.com/seanmcne/Microsoft.Xrm.Data.PowerShell
VSTS Build/Release Tasks for debugging pipelines by Max K. (knom)
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=knom.vsts-debughelper-tasks
https://github.com/knom/vsts-debug-tasks/
This project also is focused around the use of Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS/TFS) for build and release automation.
An example build for the project can be found in the /deploy folder of the GitHub project with a Build Pipeline YAML definition. The build definition includes the use of The D365 Build Tools for solution packaging and VSTS-debugging extension to assist with debugging efforts.
Colin Vermander 