Today we welcome guest blogger and CRM MVP Jim Wang of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) in the United Kingdom.
Last month, Sonoma Partners and Microsoft had an very useful article for Microsoft Dynamics CRM developers: Setting Up Your Development Environment. I provided an abstract this article for our Chinese readers. In this post, I’d like to give my ideas about how to build up a handy Dynamics CRM development environment.
The typical situation is that a CRM developer runs a Virtual PC image on his/her own PC that is an all-in-one CRM system (with Windows Server, SQL, IIS, CRM, SharePoint installed). I’m assuming the Host PC also has Visual Studio installed. I’m not going to discuss an implementation where many developers share one development environment using TFS in this article.
Setup Virtual PC environment:
Microsoft Virtual PC is a free software, it has all we need to host a development environment. You firstly install Windows Server 2003/2008 on the VPC, then install AD, DNS, IIS 6/7, SQL server 2005/2008, CRM 4, etc. Finally it’s an all-in-one CRM box, I’d like to point out that:
- It can be a Domain Controller – that’s for your development only, not for production.
- You may need 3 Network Adapters in the VPC:
a. Local only – for VPC internal use
b. Microsoft Loopback Adapter – for the communication between Host and VPC
c. Host’s Physical Adapter – for the Internet access via the Host PC
Cheers,