Dynamics 365 LCS tricks – A day in the life of LCS

We all must use LCS when working with Dynamics 365 these days, sometimes it feels good and sometimes it is frustrating.

The next real live image of LCS shows how I feel about the experience.

We are speeding up but at the same time we have to wait. 

The pitfalls one might encounter are the following:

• Deploying an environment from scratch is easy.  Just follow the steps, but still one has to be careful. Make sure to select the correct supported version. As you can see in below picture don’t trust the default values
  
• LCS updates only once a day – in the evening at 22hrs
  You can still push an update, which will be explained in a following blog post.
• Service requests must be planned a couple of hours beforehand, even when this request is not related to a production environment (eg.  a restored database between environments).
  Also, please Microsoft tell me why you are you asking at each ticket what my current build environment is, when I log my tickets in LCS? And why do I have to confirm that in an e-mail as well? Is LCS just a registration tool that pushes my service request in your e-mail box?
• Beware of updating the wrong environment
  Once one selects the environment (red block below), the screen refreshes and the scrollbar shifts. Once the full details link is pressed again, one could mistakenly select a different environment by mistake. So, in case one just keeps pressing buttons, be aware that this might lead to updating a different environment than the one intended.
  
• Deploying packages can result in environments running out of disk space.
  Solution:
  The deployment does not clean up the created backup folders. One has to do this manually.  I always cleanup the folder  J:\DeployablePackages on all machines.
• You have installed a (MS KB) X++ code fix on your build machine. You start building a new release and your just installed X++ code fix is disappeared. MS BUILD prepares a backup of the entire packages local directory. This backup is restored after BUILD completion. But this Backup was outdated because your X++ fixes are not in it.
  Solution:
  Remove all content of map I:\DynamicsBackup\Packages.  In case you don’t do it, the MS BUILD process will simply remove all those x++ fixes by restoring this map back on the  J:\AosService\PackagesLocalDirectory. By removing the content of I:\DynamicsBackup\Packages. A fresh copy is created and restored back after MS BUILD has finished.
• You have made changes to Retail, MS BUILD works fine, but it still does not work.
  Solution:
  You still must deploy the package on your build machine or local VM. It is not don automatically by MS BUILD.
• To speed up building the asset library:
  Download the required x++ fixes and binaries from LCS from an Azure windows environment. Once this is done, one can see that the uploading is much faster than downloading it to a local pc and then adding it to the asset library.
• Security
  o Don’t forget to set the property on the downloaded content, otherwise it will not work at all!

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