The Azure DevOps pipelines are the tools that allow us to automate the build and release processes. For me, this is the heart of the ALM strategy.
Build pipelines #
I’d say the Dynamics 365 F&O build pipelines in Azure DevOps is the thing that has changed the least with the Unified experience.
We still need the NuGet files from LCS, but now we’ve got 6! The application size keeps growing, and the 500MB limit on NuGet files in AZDO is the reason. Maybe it’d be a good idea to find another solution for this…
Other than that, we have a new version of the build task that lets us choose between generating the classic LCS deployable package, the new Power Platform unified package, or both.
Aaaaand! There’s actually something very interesting! If you use Git in your project, you can use the YAML instead of classic pipelines! This is something very interesting because it also allows us to have the pipeline definitions as code in our repo!
Release pipelines #
And then we have the nicest changes for the release pipelines! Here we can forget about the old F&O tasks and start using the Power Platform tools.
And the best of all? Thanks to that, we can just forget about the service connection to LCS, forget about having a user without MFA enabled. I’m sure this will make plenty of people happy, specially Entra ID admins😅
Yes, but #
And now a small disclaimer 🙂 As of April 2025, the PPAC admin experience is still not completely in use. Your sandbox and production are still likely on LCS, and you can use the old release pipelines.
But what is shown in the following sections should work. As usual, if you find any issue, you can contact me at adria (at) ariste (dot) info.
