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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Development Environments
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Development Environments

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Posted on by braddev 62

I am working as a CRM developer for a large project which will be developed on a full time basis. 

We have a number of online environments, however I was thinking it would be useful to have local dev environment as we have other developers as well working on this, what are the pros and cons of this?

I imagine in the long run it would be cheaper as its not using Azure.

Secondly if we did have local environments should we install a local on prem verion or a VM, would be interested to know what developers are doing out there and any best practices we can adopt here...

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  • Suggested answer
    gdas Profile Picture
    gdas 50,091 Moderator on at
    RE: Development Environments

    You need to think that the solution you will be provide should be align with online instance only as you will be delivered solution into online version only end of the project .So for me proceed with online sandbox instance , you can access online instance  from anywhere without any restriction and do your development activity.

    I agree that there are few advantages using on-premise , compare to online, but using on-premise you have to maintain lot of things with the VM , AD and also require additional cost.

  • Verified answer
    Radu Chiribelea Profile Picture
    Radu Chiribelea 6,667 on at
    RE: Development Environments

    Hi Brad,

    If you create an OnPrem development environment - one of the biggest pros for this would be that

    - you have direct access to the database / crm platform traces and you can easily troubleshoot any issue - compared to CRM Online

    cons (which i am afraid that are way bigger than the pros)

    - Microsoft doesn't always release the CRM Online build to CRM OnPremise - so you wouldn't be able to develop in OnPrem the same features as you would in Online

    - You might face challenges testing integrations with other products part of your Office365 / Azure tenant

    - Microsoft might not provide you with a copy of your DB - I personally haven't went through this process for quite a while, however i heard that since CRM 9.0 the Online to OnPremise DB copy is no longer shared with the customer (yet i can't say for sure if this is 100% accurate)

    In my opinion the above cons could prove to be show stoppers.

    A year ago when i was developing for CRM Online (8.2) i had also a OnPrem copy - which i ended up mostly using to fix data related issues or debugging plug-ins by attaching VS directly to the process (is a lot easier than with the plugin profiler) - but most of the stuff i did on a sandbox environment

    Hope this helps

    Radu

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