Just a quick update… Thanks to Jonas Rapp‘s excellent suggestion, I’ve deployed the controls Futurez.XrmToolbox.Controls as a NuGet package. I feel silly that I had not considered this before, but hey, that’s a great example why we post this kind of thing as open source!

Why NuGet?

The benefit of a NuGet package is that I can package up the controls and you don’t need to figure out how to build and reference them.  If needed, I can even deploy multiple versions.  A nice example of multiple versions is another of my favorite projects, the Fake Xrm Easy unit testing framework. Jordi Montaña Vázquez maintains a few versions of his framework targeting different versions of the Dynamics CRM SDK:

Maintaining these versions can mean a simple rebuild of your project against a different reference or a significant change from one version to the next. But as a user of this component, I just choose the NuGet library that works for my project and downloaded the correct references as needed. In this example, I can leverage the FakeXrmEasy unit testing framework for customer solutions ranging from Dynamics CRM 2013 through Dynamics 365 independently, letting Jordi figure out all of the dependencies! And if you move your code to a new machine or a new developer starts with your team, you can simply re-download the NuGet packages and start working right away.

I will likely not need to maintain several versions for the shared controls, but we have the option if needed now that we are deploying via NuGet!

So check out the NuGet package at https://www.nuget.org/packages/Futurez.XrmToolbox.Controls/ and the updated Getting Started page on the Github Wiki. I’ll be updating these pages with more details soon, but this should be enough to get started using the controls.

Thanks once again to Jonas for the suggestion and check out his long list of killer plugins at https://jonasrapp.net/.