How do I precisely specify the CRM Solution for CRMPackage Plugins deployment?

Question

Having trouble getting MSBuild/Visual Studio 2012 to deploy a CRM 2011 Plugin Assembly to a named CRM Solution.

I've 2 project/SLNs. In one, I can precisely control which CRM Solution the build deploys a Plugin Assembly into; my msbuild (call this build-1) creates a CRM Solution with my custom entities/forms and Plugins. In another, despite specifying the exact values via msbuild /p for CRMOrganization, CRMSolutionName, CRMDiscoveryServer, 'CRMDiscoveryServerScheme, the resulting CRM Solution contains only the entities/forms. The Plugins are deployed but placed incorrectly into the Default Solution (call this build-2).

I've created build-2 from copy/pasting the values (except SLN and Project names) from build-1...and am at a loss to understand why build-1 deploys the plugins to my named CRM Solution, but build-2 deploys them to the Organization's Default CRM Solution.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

CRM might look specifically at Display name instead of Schema Name as the solution Name.

Answer 2

Unfortunately the CRM Developer Toolkit in both VS010 and VS2012 versions is configured at the solution level only. Therefore, despite adding multiple projects to your solution they will both use the CRM Organisation settings at the solution level. It's a rather annoying limitation that's existed since the first release of the tooling I'm afraid.

The MSBuild target file used by VS (Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools.CrmClient.target) is available at the default install location C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\CRM. This folder also includes the supporting assembly containing the MSBuild Tasks if you felt like rolling your own build target.

I've looked at this briefly myself in the past but a word of warning, many of the classes in that assembly are sealed so extending them is off the table.