Post-Build actions in Visual Studio

I've been working on sorting out some issues with a plug-in in one of our applications. It all started easy enough with me thinking that a few tweaks here and there would be enough, but it has ended up being a bit of a mess and all the malarky needed to register the plug-in and copying it to the assembly directory to enable debugging, well it gets tiring quickly, so I thought I had better automate it.

To be honest, I've never had a look at build actions before, so I wasn't sure whether it was worth the effort. You know how it is, you can do something manually and it will take you 1 hour of tedious work or you can learn a better way of doing it or you can write and app/script that will take you a few hours to write. Normally I favour the latter approach, as you always learn something, even if it is that sometimes it is better to bite the bullet and do it the long way.

At any rate, I wanted to copy the plug-in library to the assembly folder only for debug builds and it turns out that this is easily done, like so:

if $(ConfigurationName) == Debug (
copy /Y "$(TargetDir)plugin.dll" "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\isv\cbs\bin\plugins.dll"
copy /Y "$(TargetDir)plugin.pdb" "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\isv\cbs\bin\plugins.pdb"
)

Make sure that the first bracket follows on the same line as Debug

This can actually be improved by doing the import at the same time as well. Starting from an already deployed plug-in (I know, I know, catch 22):

1. Open the PluginRegistrationTool and open the organization you want to update plug-ins from.
2. Hit Import/Export Button.
3. Select Export Solution Xml
4. Ensure that you only select your custom plug-ins.
5. Save this to your build directory (You can save it anywhere, but it'll save you typing if you use the build directory, .e.g $(TargetDir) ).
6. Copy the PluginRegistrationTool to your build directory (This is optional as well, but bear in mind that you will need to provide a path to the executable otherwise).
7. Copy the connections.config file to your build directory.

In order to make my life easier, my user is a deployment and system administrator, so that I can leave the credentials empty and it will use my credentials. I've not managed to get it working with different credentials.

if $(ConfigurationName) == Debug (
copy /Y "$(TargetDir)plugins.dll" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\Server\bin\assembly\plugins.dll"
copy /Y "$(TargetDir)plugins.pdb" "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Dynamics CRM\Server\bin\assembly\plugins.pdb"
PluginRegistration.exe /org:CDCC /op:import /f:ExportSolution.xml  /c:Connections.config /cl:DEBUG
)

Where CDCC is my org and DEBUG is the label on the connections.config file

Unfortunately, sometimes it seems that an iisreset is needed for the plug-ins to be picked up properly, so it might be advisable to add an iisreset command too.