Dynamics 2015 on-premises - Set plugin .NET Version

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Posted on by Clement-ALBERT

Hello Techies,

We are currently working on Dynamics 2105 on-premises.
We want to use ONLY dotnet 4.5.2 for the CRM application and the plugins/WF.
In the web.config of the CRM app we have set targetFramework=4.5.2 attribute for the following elements.

1. httpRuntime
2. compilation

We tested the CRM app and everything works fine.

Another developer has implemented a plugin in with .NET 4.6.1 and deployed using the PluginRegistrationTool. The web.config setting didn’t block the developer from deploying it and the plugin works fine.

Question : Is there a way to define the version of .NET Framework that should be used by the CRM application and the plugins deployed. We want a homogeneous .NET version between the CRM app and plugins.

For those who are curious why we would want to achieve this

1. The software factory fails to build the plugin/WF visual studio solutions because of the absence of recent versions of .NET.
2. We don’t have access to the production and we dont know if .NET 4.6.1 is available on the CRM application server.

Awaiting your valuable inputs.

Regards,
Clement

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Kokulan 18,054 on at

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Hi

if you have the Update 0.2/Update 1.1 installed for your CRM 2015 installation, then yes you can use 4.6 (4.6.1 should work as well).

If the plugin deployed by your developer works fine, it means the server .net version has been updated and it supports 4.6.1

Follow the instruction in the link below to check the .net version installed on the CRM Application server

[View:https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/migration-guide/how-to-determine-which-versions-are-installed:750:50]

Please refer to the following link for full compatibility list for CRM 2015.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/3018360/compatibility-with-microsoft-dynamics-crm-2015

Hope this helps

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Clement-ALBERT 76 on at

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Many thanks Kokulan.

We had already consulted the links you posted in your reply.

But it doesn’t answer our question.

We are looking for a way to define a specific version of .NET for the CRM app and the plugins, irrespective of the fact that a more recent version of the same exists on the target environment.

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Kokulan 18,054 on at

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I think setting 4.6.1 is kind of an like an edge choice and it will work but CRm 2015 built with native support for 4.5.2 so I would suggest you could make your team to use 4.5.2 for your 2015 instance development. All the 2015 code we have is based on 4.5.2 and we have not come across any scenario where we had to use 4.6 yet.

If you guys will be upgrading to 2016 or Dynamics 365 then you could plan an upgrade of all your plugin or workflow codes to 4.6 or latest.

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David Jennaway 14,065 on at

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Plugins (including custom workflow activities) can execute in 3 different processes, depending on how they are registered or execute:

Any assemblies registered in isolation run in the sandbox worker process

If the assembly is not registered in isolation:

If the plugin / workflow is asynchronous, the code will run in the Async Service process

If the plugin / workflow is synchronous, the code will run in the w3wp.exe (IIS) process

Web.config settings will only apply to the w3wp.exe process. As for the others, I expect they work like a typical .Net application and you could create a .exe.config file for them to control the .Net framework versions, but I've never tried this, and I doubt there's any documentation on it. I'd also think MS would consider this to be unsupported, though it's a bit of a grey area

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Clement-ALBERT 76 on at

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As you rightly said "It's a grey area".

You know what with my recent test i deployed a plugin compiled with .NET 4.7.2 and added it to the CRM 2015 on-prem.

The plugin was deployed in synchronous mode without Isolation.

And i updated the web.config to 4.5.2 on purpose to provoke a run-time exception.

And to my surprise the plugin worked fine without any errors.

I will find other ways to restrict the developers from developing plugins with unsupported .NET versions.

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