After my not so recent post comparing the relatively new built-in Power Platform Pipelines to Azure DevOps, this is a guide on how to build your ALM processes in DevOps, as it can become quite complex and confusing. The whole process will be split between multiple blog posts, in order, so it’s not too overwhelming and each unique stage can be understood clearly and prepared for correctly.

All examples below will use my organisation environment structure, for ease of explanation via consistency. Dev, QA, UAT, Live with solutions exported from Dev and into the others in turn.

Initial Reading and Preparation

To reiterate one thing from the previous post, all tasks within DevOps are ultimately wrapped for the Power Platform CLI and I would highly recommend reading this first, as even though we are not using it directly, it will help to debug problems.

To understand the basics of what the build tools are, read this page but refrain from setup for now. I will cover this via App Registrations within Azure Portal, which is visually more understandable and maintainable. You can decide to do things differently in the future if you choose.

Read about deployment settings files prior to even thinking about DevOps, as they are fundamental to using DevOps. You will not be able to populate connection reference or environment variable values without them.

Ensure you or an infrastructure colleague have access to Azure Portal from your infrastructure teams. Good practice is this being a different from your regular account, such as an admin account.

Ensure you or a colleague have access to the environments you wish to include, as above typically via an admin account.

Azure App Registration

The following steps below should be repeated for each environment you wish to use in your ALM process. 4 app registrations are required in this example to ensure isolation and security.

• Sign into portal.azure.com
• Open App registrations
• Select New registration
• Enter a meaningful and consistent name, such as Dataverse – ALM – Env Name
• In app registration, select Certificates & secrets
• Click New secret and enter a meaningful name and select chosen dates
• Copy value
  • Do not store this anywhere after you have used it in steps below, it is a security risk.
• In Overview, copy Application (secret ID)
• Copy Directory (tenant) ID

Power Platform Admin Centre

• Sign into the admin centre
• Select your first environment (Dev)
• Select Users on the right
• Select app users list link at the top
• Select New app user then add an app
• Search for name of app registration you created above and add
• Select appropriate business unit
• Assign system administrator role
• Create

Repeat the above steps for the other 3 environments, ensuring the use the 3 other app registrations from above. This will result in the 4 environments each having their unique app users assigned to them.

Azure DevOps Service Connections

• Sign into your organisations DevOps instance
• In bottom left, select project settings, service connections
• Select New service connection, then Power Platform
• Ensure Application Id and client secret is selected
• Enter URL of Power Platform environment, for example https://my-dev-env.crm11.dynamics.com
• Enter directory/tenant ID from above into Tenant ID
• Enter application ID from above into Application ID
• Enter secret value from above into Client secret of Application ID
• Enter descriptive name
• Ensure grant access permission is ticked

Repeat the above steps for the other 3 environments, using the details copied from the 3 remaining app registrations.

Summary/Next…

This will get you to the point where the services are connected and you are ready to start the build part of your pipeline. This will be in the next post, followed by releases.