Jan 18, 2019
Filed under: #daxmusings #bizapps

Welcome to 2019, the year of the X++ developer!

Today marks a great day with a release of the first Azure DevOps task for D365 FinOps users. Since documentation is still underway, I wanted to append the official blog post with some additional info to help guide you through the setup. The extension can be installed from here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Dyn365FinOps.dynamics365-finops-tools

The LCS Connection

• if your LCS project is hosted in the EU, you will need to change the “Lifecycle Services API Endpoint”. By default it points to https://lcsapi.lcs.dynamics.com but if you log into LCS and your URL for your project shows “https://eu.lcs.dynamics.com” you will need to change this api URL to also include EU, like so: https://lcsapi.eu.lcs.dynamics.com
• App registration: I encourage to use the preview setup experience (“App registrations (Preview)”). Add a “new registration” for a native application, I selected “accounts in this organizational directory only (MYAAD)”. In the redirect URI you can put anything for a native application, typically http://localhost and in the preview experience use “Public client (mobile & desktop)” to indicate this is a native application.

Thanks to Marco Scotoni for pointing out that finding the API to give permissions to, just go to the “APIs my organization uses” tab.

The Task

• Create the new connection using the app registration as described above
• LCS Project Id is the “number” of your project. You can see this in the URL when you go to your project on the LCS website, for example https://lcs.dynamics.com/V2/ProjectDashboard/1234567. I’m hoping this can eventually be made into a dropdown selection.
• File to upload… The build currently produces a ZIP file with a name that contains the actual build number, and that is not configurable there (you’d have to edit powershell for that). So until that is changed, there’s actually an easy way to fix that. Since your release pipeline has the build pipeline’s output as an artifact, you can actually grab the build’s build number. So, use the BROWSE button to select the build drop artifact, but then replace the build number with the $(Build.BuildNumber) variable. For example, on my test project this resulted in the following file path: $(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/BuildDev/Packages/AXDeployableRuntime_7.0.4641.16233_$(Build.BuildNumber).zip If your AX build is not your primary artifact, you can use the artifact alias, like $(Build.MyAlias.BuildNumber). You can find this into in the release pipeline variables documentation.
• LCS Asset Name and Description are optional, but I would recommend setting at least the name. For example, I set the following: LCS Asset Name: $(Release.ReleaseName) LCS Asset Description: Uploaded from Azure DevOps from build $(Build.BuildNumber)
• If using a hosted agent, make sure to use the latest host (“Host VS2017”).

Happy uploading!!

 

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