The Dynamics GP Blogster

I am so amped-up after my return from the Microsoft Dynamics GP Technical Conference 2017 in Fargo, ND, where I had a chance to catch up with my friends in the partner and ISV community (more on that in a later post). This year, I had a chance to introduce the topics I have been discussing here in my DevOps series and now that I am back, I want to continue writing about the subject as it gets more and more exciting. In Part 1 of this specific chapter within the series, I talked about building the actual Build-Engine project. If you remember, I specifically said that the build templates provided by Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) do not fit the bill for Dexterity projects. Dex projects tend to be a bit more cumbersome since we need to have the entire IDE around to compile, extract, and chunk our products. So, it's best if we can isolate these components into an altogether separate project (from that of our actual Dex product) for clarity sake and to maintain our own sanity. ...

Resuming my series, I wanted to touch base on the process of building and releasing Dexterity applications with Visual Studio Team services. My friend and fellow MVP, David Musgrave explained how to setup your Dexterity development environment in his Dexterity Development series  and the  first article  in this series directly addressed the source code control process. Although David showed some really clever methods to build and package your Dexterity chunk application, that process still has some downsides to it. Primarily, the process is dependent on a person and a physical machine dedicated to executing the process. Setting up a Build Engine When creating a self-contained cloud-based VSTS Build Engine for your Dexterity projects, there are a few considerations: 1. The actual Dexterity IDE. If you are building a Dexterity chunk, you need to at least have a copy of the Dexterity IDE, because you will want to compile your project dictionary prior to chunking, and ...