Your solution’s installation procedure needs to check for any prerequisites. You should never assume that a customer’s environment possesses anything beyond the minimum prerequisites required by Microsoft Dynamics CRM itself.

The most common missing prerequisite when installing a solution is the .NET Framework. Three versions of the framework are typically encountered in customer Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 environments: 3.0, 3.5, and 3.5 SP1. If you use Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2005 to create your MSI, you can specify a .NET Framework Launch Condition. Figure 9-12 shows how you can select a .NET Framework Launch Condition from your setup project, and Figure 9-13 shows how you select the version you want to enforce.

Figure 9-12. Adding .NET Framework Launch Condition

Figure 9-13. Selecting the required .NET version.

The following are additional prerequisites checks you may want to consider for your solutions:

In most cases you may want to warn customers about your prerequisites using documentation (much like the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Implementation Guide). In other cases your installer should perform any dependency checking and provide the user with the opportunity to correct missing dependencies prior to continuing.

When attempting to update plug-ins and workflow assemblies, you may need to reset IIS because Microsoft Dynamics CRM caches instances of these assemblies in memory. You can choose to have customers do this manually or have your installer and configuration applications do this automatically. The best way to restart IIS using .NET is to use the Process.Start method. For more information regarding the Process.Start command, please review http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/h6ak8zt5.aspx.

You generally use the native import/export customizations functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM when deploying customizations between environments. However, this process can also be found to cause deployment errors. In order to help minimize errors, always make customizations changes to a master Microsoft Dynamics CRM deployment and then import those changes to new environments.

Sometimes a large number of customizations create a server timeout, which will fail the import. You can attempt to import a few entities at a time or try some of the registry changes listed in the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918609.

Finally, you can use the MetadataService Web service to create attributes and relationships or automate the import and export process with the CrmService Web service.