Managed solutions – what are the benefits?

So, we all know how managed solutions vs unmanaged solutions discussions used to be raging a few years ago.

Then Microsoft stepped in to make it clear that managed solutions are recommended for production environments and unmanaged ones are only supposed to be used in development.

This is where things currently stand, and this is what we are all recommending to the clients, but, come to think of it, I would probably want to see more explanations than “it’s better because we say so”.

Unfortunately, looking at the ALM demos, this is how it usually is:

• Managed solutions should be used in production
• Managed solutions can be deleted
• Components in the managed solutions can be locked down
• Managed solutions support layering

I see how the ability to “delete” managed solutions can be important for ISV-s. Although, as soon as we create a dependency in our own solutions on those third-party managed solutions that ability becomes pretty much non-existent.

I also see how it may be useful to lock down some components of the managed solutions, but possibly, it’s an ISV thing, too? I’ve never used it for the internally developed solutions, even for the “core” ones.

Layering, although it’s an interesting concept, is, arguably, one feature that can mess up quite a few things. There is a lot of functionality in Power Platform that had to be implemented around layering to support it better (solution history screen, component layers screen, merging, etc). Just to hypothesize, would not it be easier not to have layering? As in, make everything unmanaged and leave it to the admins/developers to make sure solutions are installed in the right sequence.

I guess the core problem is “merging”, and all that layering is meant to facilitate/resolve merging issues (or, at least, to put some rules around how it’s done). Given that the conflicts are still not getting resolved in the same way it’s done with pro-code, though, I wonder if it would be better/easier to just go with “most recent change wins” approach (which is, basically, “unmanaged”). After all, how often would you actually even try resolving a conflict directly in the XML file when merging in the source control? I would just overwrite in those cases.

So, I wonder, is there someone there who can clearly state the advantages of managed solutions, possibly with good examples, so that we could all say “yes, you nailed it”? Would be great to have this kind of closure to the old question of why should we be actually using managed solutions.