Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Unified Development Environment (UDE) - CI/CD and Automation Best Practices

We have an internal automation tool built for Dynamics 365 F&O Cloud Hosted Environments (CHE) that performs:

Git Get Latest / Pull

Build Models

Database Synchronization

Report Deployment

Work Item updates

As we are moving to Unified Development Environments (UDE), we are trying to understand Microsoft's recommended approach for automation.

My questions are:

1. Is it possible to automate Build Models, Deploy Models to Online Environment, and Synchronize Database in UDE without manual interaction with Visual Studio?

2. Does Microsoft provide any official support for Azure DevOps Pipelines to perform these operations? Or PowerShell ?

3. When developers execute Build Models, Synchronize Database, and Deploy Models to Online Environment from Visual Studio, what is actually running behind the scenes? Are there documented commands or executables?

4. What is Microsoft's recommended CI/CD strategy for UDE environments?

5. Has anyone successfully migrated an automation solution from CHE to UDE? If so, what architecture did you adopt?

Azure DevOps Pipelines?
Dedicated technical UDE?
Other approach?

Our goal is to avoid running automation on individual developer machines and instead implement a centralized and scalable solution.

Any guidance, documentation, or real-world experience would be greatly appreciated.

Categories:

Dynamics 365 Finance

1.+2. Yes, it's possible. The official documentation is here: Continuous integration and deployment. DB synchronization is run automatically during the package deployment.

3. This is not about CI/CD and the answer may be quite complex, therefore I recommend creating a separate discussion thread for it.

4. Microsoft won't tell you exactly what to do, but you can see in the documentation what tools they have prepared for you.

5. You definitely need an orchestrator such as Azure Pipelines or GitHub Actions. An UDE environment alone isn't sufficient. Using the existing actions (such as Power Platform Deploy Package) is easier than building something on your own, but if you wanted, you could use Power Platform APIs directly.

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