Power Platform ALM process guidance published and Power Platform Build Tools general available

Microsoft just published dedicated documentation around Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with the Power Platform and Dynamics 365. This is a great starting point for everyone who wants to mature their development and deployment practice.

At the same time Microsoft announced the general availability of their Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools for Azure DevOps .  If you have used the preview version of the Power Platform Build Tools you will need to install the new extensions and you will need to recreate your build and release pipelines. You can install the Power Platform Build Tools extension from Azure Marketplace and they are free to use within Azure DevOps Services (online) or Azure DevOps Server.

Keep in mind though that setting up a good ALM practice, is about more than just tooling being in place (For a good discussion take a look at Continuous Integration is not a tooling problem)

If you are already using tooling like the Power DevOps Tools from @waelhaemze, it might not (yet) make sense to switch over but if you are new to DevOps/ALM for Dynamics 365/Power Platform definitely take a look (for more background on this topic see My Perspective on the PowerApps Build Tools for Azure DevOps )

References

• Let's chat about the new Power Platform ALM guidance (Youtube) with Scott Durow, Jonas Rapp, Tricia Sinclair and Reece Campbell
• Dynamics 365 and ALM/DevOps Information to get you started
• Getting started with Power DevOps tools (Youtube) from @waelhaemze

My perspective on the PowerApps Build Tools for Azure DevOps

Mid July 2019 Microsoft released a preview of a set of PowerApps specific Azure DevOps Build tasks.  In the last months this tooling has been updated on a quite regular pace which indicates that  ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) for Power Platform (and Dynamics 365 Sales/Customer Service/etc..) is high on the priority list for Microsoft.

For those of you who are new to Azure DevOps, here is a small summary. Azure DevOps is a set of services hosted on Microsoft Azure cloud which support your full software development lifecycle  e.g. you can use Azure Boards for work tracking and backlogs, Azure Pipelines for  CI/CD, Azure Repos for source control, and much more.  Azure DevOps is successor to  Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and the best thing of all you can get started with it for free. (For more details see Pricing for Azure DevOps). You can start learning Azure DevOps by exploring the Azure DevOps Hands-On Labs

In the past most Dynamics 365 CE consultants largely relied on a BYOALM (Bring Your Own ALM) approach meaning that you need a combination of PowerShell script, SDK extensions, etc … to automate the build and release of Dynamics components. I even think that in the majority of cases there is no fully automated build and release process in place - meaning that a deployment relies on a number of (hopefully documented) manual steps.  In one of the projects I recently worked on - we have been using the excellent Dynamics 365 Build Tools for Azure DevOps from Wael Haemze so there are other extensions available for Azure DevOps as well.

After you have installed the PowerApps Build Tools you will see a whole set of build and release tasks that you can use in your build and release pipelines. To explore the possibilities you can start with the PowerApps Build tools for Azure DevOps Hands On Lab files which contains a walk through of the different scenarios like for example using the PowerApps Solution Checker (see reference section for more information on this)

If you compare the PowerApps Build Tools with the Dynamics 365 Build Tools, you will probably see that Dynamics 365 Build Tools currently still offers more capabilities but it does seem worthwhile to start exploring the newly released Microsoft tooling.  I recently also got feedback within the context of a Microsoft support case that they recommended to use the new PowerApps build tooling because they would not troubleshoot issues with other extensions on top of Azure DevOps in combination with Dynamics 365.

I  also expect more information to come available in the coming weeks as we are getting closer to the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2020 Release Wave 1 . In the meanwhile I will be sharing more information in some upcoming blog posts.

References:

• Announcement: automate your application lifecycle management (ALM) with PowerApps  Build Tools (Preview)
• PowerApps Build tools for Azure DevOps Hands On Lab files
• PowerApps Build Tools for Azure DevOps Overview (Microsoft docs)
• Introducing the PowerApps Checker PowerShell module to check PowerApps solution quality 
• General availability of PowerApps Solution checker makes it easier to check Dynamics 365 solution quality
• Ignite 2019 sessionon ALM/DevOps for Dynamics 365 - Azure DevOps for Power Platform ISVs:Automate ISV solution deployments and release regular upgrades and patches toall customers concurrently by @MimCRM