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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,... / Dev environment
Customer experience | Sales, Customer Insights,...
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Dev environment

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Posted on by johnnyboy 5

Hi, I'm a beginner in Microsoft Dynamics CRM but I've got a background in other CRMs.

How does normal developers develop for Dynamics? Visual studio for mac I've read so far is the IDE of choice. Now I'm trying find information about how to connect to Microsofts CRM and deploy code. It seems everyone is using the raw api to deploy or do function calls directly from code. This is NOT what I want. I'm sure there is another way of doing this. The workflow should be 1. Write code 2. Deploy Code, with possible intermediary steps. Yet I can't find any good information on the topic.


Happy to receive any help or pointers!
Thanks in advance!

  • johnnyboy Profile Picture
    johnnyboy 5 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Perfect information, thank you. I think we finally understood each other. Now I have an idea of the workflow and which concepts to delve deeper into.

    Mvh

    J

  • Verified answer
    Johao Larios Profile Picture
    Johao Larios 1,795 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Johnnyboy,

    That is because if depends of what you are passing from C# to dynamics. If you are creating workflows or custom activities, you use something named Plugin Registration Tool to send the .dll from Visual Studio to Dynamics CE.

    If you are interacting from a C# application with Dynamics CE, you don't need to move any code.

    If you are adding JavaScript, you will have to register it in the desired entity directly using the out of the box form editor.  

    If you are creating entities and fields from visual studio, then you need to use the package deployer, which is related to the concept of solutions.  Using solutions, you create the fields and entities(no records), which will be available until you publish the changes.

    Is worth to say that must of the Dynamics CE customization could be done using the UI, for example the creation of entities and fields.

    Plugin Registration tool:

    docs.microsoft.com/.../register-plug-in

    Package deployer

    docs.microsoft.com/.../create-packages-package-deployer

    Create entities:

    docs.microsoft.com/.../data-platform-create-entity

    JavaScript:

    docs.microsoft.com/.../use-javascript

    Regards,

  • johnnyboy Profile Picture
    johnnyboy 5 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Thanks Parashuram, this is towards the answer I was looking for. More hands-on, less references to documentation. The word publish means that I "Activate" my changes, often between sandbox->production. I'm still not sure if this is what i'm looking for.

    Because what I'm looking for is the word for transfering my code from my visual studio INTO Dynamics. I've seen examples of people writing whole c# classes with API calls with many many parameters for creating objects, custom objects, fields and more. To clarify again; this is NOT what I'm looking to do. And I'm still not sure if it's doable but I want to have my code in Visual studio, and run a deploy script within the IDE to transplant my code into the online environment.

    For example if I have a class in c#, I want to transfer it into the online environment. I DONT want to construct the entire api call on how to do that.

    Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something,

    and thanks for your reply!

    Thanks in advance

    //J

  • Suggested answer
    Johao Larios Profile Picture
    Johao Larios 1,795 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Thanks for the clarification. 

    We have a  source control option https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customerengagement/on-premises/developer/use-source-control-solution-files and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customerengagement/on-premises/developer/solution-tools-team-development 

    My recommendation is not use a mac since you will require .net framework and the .net core is still not supported for D365.  People use Visual Studio and text editors such visual studio code. 

    regards

  • johnnyboy Profile Picture
    johnnyboy 5 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Maybe I should rephrase what it is that I'm looking for.

    I'm looking for some as-is dev input for way of working. Some general pointer on what to use and if I can do everything from my mac for example. I've gotten no input on deployments so I still don't know if that's possible. And yes I've read your documentation and sure I've found "CreateEntityRequest" for creating custom objects (or entities in ms lingo) but this is STILL not really what I'm looking for.

    Let's say I'm starting up a larger project with source tracking, is the way we work with dynamics is we save the actual callouts for creating metadata and source track it? In my mind we should source track the relevant parts; the entity itself. Do we actually need to create whole files with specific callouts that also contain the metadata with the intended functionality?

    And I guess for someone as new to me to dynamics, I don't have to know all the different ways of doing things, just the one the Microsoft primarily supports and intend people to use.

    I appreciate your help though. Other forums seem a bit empty.

    //J

  • Parashuram Profile Picture
    Parashuram 381 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Hi,

    This is great source to start with with sample code.

    docs.microsoft.com/.../overview

    You can Visual studio IDE for developing some custom logic such as plugins in C# and for JS script u can write within MSCRM Webresource and publish it(it's nothing but deploy)

    It would be better if u go through some basic features like security model,Out of box configuration and customization etc. of Dynamics CRM rather than jumping into coding.

    Regards,

    Parashuram Jadhav

  • Suggested answer
    Johao Larios Profile Picture
    Johao Larios 1,795 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Hello,

    You should start from here: docs.microsoft.com/.../work-with-data-cds

    Basically, you need to understand how is the architecture of our product.  And there are several ways about how to connect from C#, at the link shared there are some examples of how to interact with dynamics CE.

    You will need to install .net framework, right now .net core is not supported if you are trying to interact using SOAP, but if you use webapi calls, it will work and is supported.

    You need to install our SDK dlls as well, all this information is in the link that I shared.

    Please let me know if you have more questions.

  • johnnyboy Profile Picture
    johnnyboy 5 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Thanks Johao,

    (Im using mac by the way, not sure if that will be supported)

    To begin working programmatically, how would i setup my dev environment. Visual studio I now have installed. How do I "connect" to dynamics. Can I add a field to the Account object programmatically and deploy it in some supported process from visual studio?

    Thanks

  • Suggested answer
    Johao Larios Profile Picture
    Johao Larios 1,795 on at
    RE: Dev environment

    Hello there,

    Thanks for choosing Dynamics CE.

    There are a lot of ways about how to interact with CRM programmatically.

    You can write C# Apps, Plugins(C#), Javascripts, embedded HTML and even more.

    We recommend customer's use three at least three environments:

    DEV, UAT and Production.

    So, you write and test in Dev, then in UAT your experts users confirm the changes and then you move to production.

    You can add more environments as needed as well.

    To move the customizations from one environment to another one, we use solutions.

    Please check this:

    docs.microsoft.com/.../solutions-overview

    docs.microsoft.com/.../overview

    Please do let me know if you have any more questions or please mark this as an answer if it answered your questions.

    regards,

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