With the introduction of Solutions and concept of layering and versioning in Dynamics CRM 2011 we have a pretty good ALM story which can help patching, upgrading the CRM systems in a deterministic way however one of the issues which was still unsolved and a pain was on how to collaborate on CRM customizations as a team.
So far all the CRM customizations are done on a server. If one wants to take advantage of source control to figure out what changes are being made to the customizations then the only option is to export the solution in a zip file and check it in. There’s no way to compare the zip files as they are binary. To work around this limitation a team can decide to unzip the file and check in the 3 huge xml files which are compressed inside the zip file. But then to diff such huge files is a problem in itself. Additionally there’s no way to build the solution without having a dependency on a CRM server.
CRM team has recently released a tool called Solution Packager which can split the customizations inside a solution zip file to granular xml files i.e. creating a xml file for each view, form, web resource etc. You can now use the source control to check in these files and its easier to spot the differences between each versions.
The same tool can then be used on the build server to package these individual files and generate a CRM solution thus removing the dependency on the CRM Server during the build process.
You can find more details about this tool here.
Happy Coding!!!
¬Abhishek
