Issues with solutions in Ms Dynamics CRM 2011 - Be careful when renaming custom workflow activities

We have a couple of custom workflow activity libraries, and one of them is a bit like a helper library with about 10 custom activities and yesterday I decided to screw it all up had a brilliant idea. One of the custom activities was confusingly named as it had been extended from its original purpose of retrieving an entityreference to a custom entity, to actually create that custom entity if it could not be found, so far so good.

I then thought that a bit of control would be nice, so I added a new argument so that we could choose whether the custom entity would be created if it wasn't found.

I updated the assembly on the server using the pluginregistration tool and nothing happened, the new attribute would not appear, cue bouncing of the CRM services, still nothing. IIS went down and up and still nothing. Server does the same thing and nothing.

So bullet biting time then; I removed the custom workflow activity from the three dialogs where it was being used, thankfully at the very end of the dialogs and then deleted it using the pluginregistration tool, updated the assembly again, bounce the crm services and iis and it starts working.

Incidentally, in theory this should not be needed, i.e. adding a new argument to a workflow should just show in CRM, but this might be only if it's not in use anywhere, I don't really know, every time I have made a change like this, i.e. add or remove attributes I have had to go through the rigmarole, which is really annoying.

I fixed the dialogs back to what they were and think nothing of it, until late this afternoon, when the import of the solution to the test server fails.

We then tried doing a new import but this time we use the overwrite all customizations and still it fails, so same procedure as in the development environment, namely remove the custom workflow activity from the dialogs, remove the custom workflow activity from the server using the pluginregistration tool, then finally we were able to import the solution successfully.

The moral of the story is:

Be Careful When  Renaming Custom Workflow Activities