Working with managed solutions, ALM and deployment

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Posted on by tesla3driver

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Hi All,

I wondering if someone has some ideas here.

I have been informed by Microsoft for best practice to work with solutions and deployment according to the ALM process..

Which means managed solutions on the UAT and PROD environments. And thats all fine.

Also according the the Best Practice to avoid Cross layering use multiple solutions for specific functions so as I understand create a solution for Customizations, like Forms, columns, views and so on., Solution for Web Resources, Solution for Process and Flows and so on.

Is that really a good approach?

And the regarding the deployment. If using dev ops pipelines you are not able to work with patches as understand, so the entire solution has to be moved at all times?

Now we will not go ahead with using dev ops pipelines after the release of Microsoft Managed Environments and Power Pipelines but also here I guess that is not supporting patch so the entire solution has to be deployed which i guess is OK as it automated.

But working with development the users do not test in DEV environment only in the UAT environment so every time we need users to test something we need to deploy some of the ALM solutions above from DEV to UAT which is a tedious and time consuming job.

So I think from all my writing above what are your ides or findings working with the ALM process and mainly development / testing phase to optimize the production time?

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RodRodriguez on at

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RE: Working with managed solutions, ALM and deployment

Howdy!

Here is a great document for maintaining healthy ALM:

Maintaining healthy model-driven app form ALM with Power Apps - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

Here is the first in a series of really good documents on solutions and ALM (take a look at the document list on the left, LOTS of good stuff there):

Use scenarios to implement healthy ALM with Microsoft Power Apps - Power Platform | Microsoft Learn

The main concept of the "best practices" you outlined above (avoiding cross layering of solutions) is to keep the number of solution layers on any one element to a minimum. I have see cases where there have been well over a dozen solutions all making changes to an element and depending which is "on top" determines what is shown/working in the system.

I have also seen issues where people will create huge monolithic solutions that have ALL THE THINGS(tm) and takes forever to install/update.

Ideally you have the solutions that comprise your environments broken down along functional lines so things that are usually modified together are put in the same solution. That will keep the solutions tight and help keep cruft from building up and also allows for quicker deployments.

I *do* recommend having a separate solution (or solutions) for your processes however. Those tend to be among the more troublesome/time consuming solutions to import as they perform operations in the system and are more likely to wait for resources to be freed up for SQL locks to be placed on the elements during the solution upgrades. Also, once things are set, processes don't tend to be modified often, so having them part of a solution just slows down the deployment unnecessarily.

Also, one "best practices" thing I recommend is making sure that when you are deploying managed solutions, you save an unmanaged version of the solution and squirrel it away in your "digital sock drawer" in case you need it someday.

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tesla3driver 113 on at

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RE: Working with managed solutions, ALM and deployment

Thanks,

good points its not far off that I thought might be to way to go.. Good idea to save an Unmanaged version of the managed solution.

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