Source control for MS Dynamics CRM

Question

I'm undecided about CRM at the moment. It's a great tool for the business users but so far for development it's been a bit against the grain. The next problem I need to tackle is how to easily source control javascript used within forms. We use TFS for our source control.

Anyone had an experience or have any ideas on how to do this?

Obvious choice would be to copy and paste the JS in to your source control, but it's also an obvious pain in the rear.

Answer 1

A couple of things that we do in our projects:

1. We use the Web Resource Utility included with the CRM SDK (actually a modified version of it) to deploy JavaScript web resources to a particular solution. Makes it very easy to keep script files checked in to source control as normal and avoid copying and pasting.
2. We wrote a custom HTTP Module that we use on local deployments. It intercepts requests for JavaScript libraries and redirects them to a location on local disk. That way, we don't have to actually redeploy the web resources as we test, just the JavaScript files to disk. (Note that this would be unsupported in a production environment. We just do it in our development environments to ease the pain of JavaScript deployment).

Answer 2

I answered a very similar question here - Version Control for Visual Studio projects and MS Dynamics CRM (javascript)

My choice for source control is TFS holding each of the 2011 JScript libraries.

Answer 3

You can take a look on my answer on my own question here .

MS Dynamics CRM 2011 SDK has solutionpackager.exe utility what could split all CRM resources into file tree and you can store them either in git or in tfs .

Answer 4

We try to mirror the file structure that Dynamics uses for Web resources in a basic Library project. So version control works as normal, we just don't use the output from the project.

You can also try using the new "CRM Solution" project template (installed from the SDK) and have the ability to deploy from the context menu of the project.

I've had some issues with the template but something to check out.

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

Any web resource in CRM 2011 is a pain to manage. We just end up doing a lot of copy pasting in and out of TFS 2010 (which has actually caused some problems with poor pastes).

Currently out of the box there isn't an easy way to do it.

Answer 6

1. Only worry about this if you really need the ability to go back to old versions of web resources. I've found that I don't often have to do this. Remember that the web resources are stored in SQL Server just like they would be if you put them in TFS, so as long as your CRM database is being backed up, you won't lose the web resources. In traditional development, it is important to keep the source in TFS because you can't easily get back to it once you compile and release. With CRM development, your web resources are mostly HTML or JavaScript, so you can always get at the source.

2. If you really need version control, why not build a quick little console app that downloads all customizations every night and stores that zip file in TFS? True, it wouldn't be as easy to get at older versions, but you should gain a lot of productivity by not having to manually keep TFS in sync. This also has the benefit of storing all customizations in TFS, not just web resources.

3. Silverlight is the obvious exception here - I would definitely store Silverlight web resource source code in TFS, because it is a "compiled" web resource. You are already in Visual Studio, so TFS is a natural fit anyway.

Hope that helps!