Having trouble getting MSBuild/Visual Studio 2012 to deploy a CRM 2011 Plugin Assembly to a named CRM Solution.
I've 2 project/SLNs. In one, I can precisely control which CRM Solution the build deploys a Plugin Assembly into; my msbuild (call this build-1) creates a CRM Solution with my custom entities/forms and Plugins. In another, despite specifying the exact values via msbuild /p for CRMOrganization, CRMSolutionName, CRMDiscoveryServer, 'CRMDiscoveryServerScheme, the resulting CRM Solution contains only the entities/forms. The Plugins are deployed but placed incorrectly into the Default Solution (call this build-2).
I've created build-2 from copy/pasting the values (except SLN and Project names) from build-1...and am at a loss to understand why build-1 deploys the plugins to my named CRM Solution, but build-2 deploys them to the Organization's Default CRM Solution.
Any ideas?
CRM might look specifically at Display name instead of Schema Name as the solution Name.
Unfortunately the CRM Developer Toolkit in both VS010 and VS2012 versions is configured at the solution level only. Therefore, despite adding multiple projects to your solution they will both use the CRM Organisation settings at the solution level. It's a rather annoying limitation that's existed since the first release of the tooling I'm afraid.
The MSBuild target file used by VS (Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools.CrmClient.target) is available at the default install location C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\CRM. This folder also includes the supporting assembly containing the MSBuild Tasks if you felt like rolling your own build target.
I've looked at this briefly myself in the past but a word of warning, many of the classes in that assembly are sealed so extending them is off the table.
Related
I'm currently looking at NuGet to solve my dependency problems in TFS and what I wanted to do is to host my own NuGet server that would take care of internal dependencies. I also want to use NuGet to handle my 3rd party dependencies as well. I'm trying to set up automated builds for our company and this is one roadblock I'm trying to overcome with NuGet.
So my question is how do I handle this scenario in which I have to retrieve my dependencies from different servers?
Is there a better way to handle internal dependencies? How is everyone else doing this?
Also just as a note I intend on using NuGet without committing packages to TFS. I planned on using the method outline in this article:
http://blog.davidebbo.com/2011/08/easy-way-to-set-up-nuget-to-restore.html
Glad you're looking into the no commit scenario for NuGet packages on TFS. You can take a look at my blog post on this topic where I explain the concept.
EDIT (2012/06/13): NuGetPowerTools is replaced by NuGet's built-in package restore functionality. However, same concept of changing the PackageSources element in nuget.targets still applies.
You definitely should take a look at David Fowler's NuGetPowerTools.
After installing this package, you can Enable-PackageRestore (newly installed command in Package Manager Console), which will add...
Enabling package restore will add MSBuild targets to your project files. These MSBuild targets will trigger nuget.exe in a pre-build step and fetch any packages required by your project.
No need to check-in NuGet packages in source control, all you need is the packages.config and these msbuild tasks.
To configure multiple, different package sources, you need to set some settings to be used by these MSBuild tasks. One of them is PackageSources. You can set it by editing the NuGet.targets file, which you will find in the .nuget folder once you enabled package restore.
Regarding those package sources, you could set up different internal NuGet galleries, or simply set up different network shares to be used. This is a matter of requirements and preference, so you can choose. All you need to do, is to tell your msbuild targets to use these packagesources. The order in which you define them, will be the order of lookup of packages as well.
Good luck!
Xavier
Little update on accepted answer and question:
When using TFS as a buildmachine without visual studio installed on it, you can do the following so the buildmachine automatically uses your custom packageSources (more than 1 in the same solution) without any further configuration of packagesources in your solution.
Create a machine default config by placing a NuGet.Config in the root ( C:\NuGet.Config ) by using sample from: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/nuget-config-file
Comment out the line with: <add key="repositorypath" value="$\External\Packages" />
Otherwise your packages gets expanded in C:\$\External\packages\'. When commented out, the config gets chained and the right directory will be used.
Config your needed packagesource(s).
For more Info about other options (e.g. user specifc) see: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/nuget-config-file (bottom of the page).
I have three different MSI's created to deploy my project. My end result is to run a single exe that will call the rest three MSI's, with the current running installation description or name. As same as we see while Visual Studio Installation.
I have tried WIX but didn't come up with anything. Please guide.
Environment - Visual Studio 2008 / 2010 with Win 7
You're looking for a bootstrapper (sometimes called a chainer). There are many available, including open-source ones like DotNetInstaller and WiX's Burn.
You could create one MSI and combine all you project's primary outputs. If you need to separate them just add a folder for each project's primary outputs.
I've seen similar questions and answers but found them not really what I want.
I have a large solution with several web projects in it. All the web projects share some common code so they are all part of the same solution (there is a common project that is referenced by all of them).
I've been running on Team Foundation Server 2008 and we are upgrading to TFS 2010 to be ready for our move to visual studio 2010 and .net 4.0.
I've got the build working with a 2010 build by creating a new build because we only had one customization I'm trying to reproduce.
Once the build is done I have the files dumped at
\\SERVER\tfsdump\devel2010 build\devel2010 build_20101008.3\_PublishedWebsites
by using the dump folder option but the build location is
C:\Builds\1\Web Applications\devel2010 build\Binaries\_PublishedWebsites
All I want to do is after the build is finished I want to copy _PublishedWebsites\SiteA to \ServerA\ShareA
and copy _PublishedWebsites\SiteB to \ServerB\ShareB
Because there is only one build agent all I need is to call a batch file to run the copy but for easy of use for my developers I need this batch file to be called after every build. Is this possible or is there a better solution?
To make things harder the site is still a 2008 project and it is requested that it stays that way until we can fully test it under VS 2010.
Use a CopyDirectory build activity, set Source property equal to BuildDetail.DropLocation + "\_PublishedWebsites\SiteA" and set Destination property to your desired location. I have put this activity as the last activity in build process and it works properly.
Taking a cue from Afshar's answer, for people directly editing XAML template file, create a new sequence after copy to the Drop location is successful:
DisplayName="Something" Source="[BuildDetail.DropLocation + "_PublishedWebsites\SiteA " ]" />
The quotes inside should be written as " and semicolon.
I have an ASP.NET MVC 2 application.
Web project contains a reference to SomeProject
SomeProject contains references to ExternalAssembly1 and ExternalAssembly2.
SomeProject explicitly calls into ExternalAssembly1, but NOT ExternalAssembly2.
ExternalAssembly1 calls into ExternalAssembly2
When I perform a local build everything is cool. All DLLs are included in the bin\debug folder. The problem is that when I use the Publish Web command in Visual Studio 2010, it deploys everything except ExternalAssembly2.
It appears to ignore assemblies that aren't directly used (remember, ExternalAssembly2 is only used by ExternalAssembly1).
Is there any way I can tell Visual Studio 2010 to include ExternalAssembly2?
I can write a dummy method that calls into ExternalAssembly2. This does work, but I really don't want to have dummy code for the sole purpose of causing VS2010 to publish the DLL.
None of these answers are sufficient in my mind. This does seem to be a genuine bug. I will update this response if I ever find a non-hack solution, or Microsoft fixes the bug.
Update:
Doesn't seem promising.
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/731303/publish-web-feature-not-including-all-dlls
I am having this same problem (different assemblies though). If I reference the assemblies in my web project, then they will get included in the publish output, but they should be included anyway because they are indirect dependencies:
Web Project ---> Assembly A ---> Assembly B
On build, assemblies A and B are outputed to the \bin folder. On publish, only assembly A is outputed to the publish folder.
I have tried changing the publish settings to include all files in the web project, but then I have files in my publish output that shouldn't be deployed.
This seems like a bug to me.
I had the same problem with VS2010 and a WCF Service Application.
It turns out that if your (directly or indirectly) referenced DLL's are deployed to GAC, the VS publishing feature excludes them. Once I removed the assemblies from GAC, publishing feature started working as expected.
I guess VS is assuming that if your assemblies can be located in GAC on the machine you build, they will be located in GAC on the target machine as well. At least in my case this assumption is false.
My tests show that the external assemblies get published when I have a reference on them in the web project. I do not have to write any dummy code to make it work. This seems acceptable to me.
I agree with Nicholas that this seems to be a bug in visual studio. At least it escapes me what the reason for the behavior could be.
I have created this issue as a bug on Microsoft Connect. If anyone experiencing it could vote it up https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/637071/publish-web-feature-not-including-all-dlls then hopefully we'll get something done about it.
If you go into the ExternalAssembly2 reference property list and change the "Copy Local" to "True" i think that might solve your issue.
I don't know if you are watching this still but I found the solution (I had the exact same issue) via this MSDN article. Under "build action" for the file choose "Content" that should include it in the list of files publish brings over.
I have created a new Connect bug here https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/731303/publish-web-feature-not-including-all-dlls
I've also attached a solution and detailed steps to reproduce this issue. Lets hope this time they won't close it as Can't Reproduce.
Vote for this connect issue if you experience the missing dll problem.
Copy local did the trick. I had an issue that the Newtonsoft.Json assembly get included in the deploymeny package. Copy local was set to false.
I am experiencing the same type of issue with a web project. I have a web project that references assembly A which references assembly B. It worked fine for some time but today it was broken. I did a rebuild of the solution and this time it deployed everything correctly.
I had this same problem today. I published my web project and realized that not all of the reference DLL's were there. In particular, the indirect DLL references.
It turns out that the directory in which I was publishing to was out of disk space (network share). I had just enough space to publish all the files except for few indirect reference DLL's. The sad part is that VS08 didn't throw any errors. It just published the files are usual. I cleared out some HDD space and everything worked fine.
I didn't find the HDD space issue until I tried to manually move the DLL's over.
in my case it is quite tricky.
Reference to ExternalAssembly2 is not required to Build the project but vital for run-time since we use reflection to configure Unity container.
So, I delete the reference - build the project successfully, but get run-time error.
If I preserve the reference I can Build and Run the application but I cannot Publish it with ExternalAssembly2 - get run-time exception as well.
This is happen because of internal VS2010 assemblies optimization.
So, what we can do here?
1. Put some unrequired peice of code to use any ExternalAssembly2's class.
2. escape from reflection and use static assemblies linking.
Hope this helps to smbd.
I got the same problem and this is a VS2010 bug if there's a reference link like:
Web Project --> custom project --> assembly1 -->(indirectly) assembly2.
For now I find if I reference the Assembly1 in the web project, then assembly2 is included in the bin folder.
So I had to add an additional reference link like:
Web project --> assembly1 -->(indirectly) assembly2.
Then VS can recognize assembly2 and include its dll file in publish action.
Can any one tell me how to convert an legacy application which is vb6 ( COM dll's ocx and exes) to use Regfree COM .
I tried opening the dlls in visual studio and created manifest file, but some of the dlls it is giving error.
Is there any tools out there which will help me to do this process?
I tried a tool from codeproject which is called regsvr42, which is not creating the manifest fully.
I used tools like PE explorer where I get all the typelib information , but converting them into manifest files is too difficult.
We have started migrating that to .NET, for some months we have to deploy it, it will easier if it is xcopy based deployment.
To create manifest files you can try to use Make My Manifest from http://mmm4vb6.atom5.com/.
EDIT The MMM website is down. I see here that the author was having trouble with their hosting and has provided another location to get Make My Manifest - download it here.
If you can control creation of objects you can use DirectCOM from http://www.thecommon.net/10.html
Keep in mind that if one of used DLLs or OCXs is creating other COM objects dynamically with CreateObject calls, that reference will not be stored in vbp project file and you won't get full manifest file. Probably you will have to catch object creations while the application is running. Depends.exe application can profile running application and report all used dlls. I don't know if there is tool that can find additional COM related information.
There is an excellent walkthrough of what to do in this article on MSDN: Registration-Free Activation of COM Components: A Walkthrough.
Make My Manifest can accomodate late binding as well as early binding. You simply have to add the references to the late-bound dependencies manually, by file location or by ProgId.
You might look at http://mmm4vb6.atom5.com/mmm-demo-1248.html for additional help in using the utility.
MakeMyManifest is well spoken of as an automatic tool for creating manifests for VB6 projects, haven't tried it myself.
DirectCOM also has fans, again I haven't tried it.
EDIT The MMM website is down. I see here that the author was having trouble with their hosting and has provided another location to get Make My Manifest - download it here.
There is a semi-automatic technique. You can create the manifests with Visual Studio 2008 (you can use a free version like Visual Basic Express Edition). Then make a couple of edits by hand to make the manifests suitable for use from VB6. See this section of this MSDN article for step-by-step instructions - ignore the rest of the article which is about ClickOnce.