Last week, Microsoft had published a blog post stating that deploying Dynamics AX 2012 R3 environments through Lifecycle Services has been temporarily disabled in response to the WannaCrypt Ransomware. The system maintenance activity initiated to patch AX 2012 R3 VHD images has now been completed and environment deployments through Lifecycle Services has resumed.
Our priority is the security and health of your Dynamics AX environments.
This blog post contains up to date information on the known issues that are actively being investigated by Microsoft.
| Issue | Description | Status |
| Applying binary updates through LCS on TIER 1 or development machines older than Update 3 throws an error | When applying binary update through LCS on a development environment or TIER 1 environment older than Update 3, it fails to update all service models and throws an error. Current workaround is to apply binary update manually using the AXUpdateInstaller on pre-Update 3 environments. | Fixed. |
| Applying an update manually using the Update installer does not update the Platform version on the Environment Details page. | Environment details page shows the Application release, platform release in the manage environment section. After applying a platform update package through, the platform release should get updated. However, if you apply the platform update package manually using the AxUpdateInstaller, then the platform release does not get updated. | Under investigation. |
Currently, you can deploy Dynamics AX 2012 R3 in one of the following ways:
This blog post is a 30-day notice to inform you that the option to deploy Dynamics AX 2012 R3 environments through Azure Marketplace will deprecated by the end of June. This means that the only way to deploy Dynamics AX 2012 R3 is by using Lifecycle Services. You can follow the steps provided in the topic, Deploy a Dynamics AX 2012 R3 or AX 2012 R3 CU8 demo environment on Azure.
The Maintain button on the Environment page in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) lets environment managers apply binary updates directly to their Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Operations environment from LCS. However, because of a known issue, binary updates can no longer be applied to build environments. This change is temporary.
To work around this issue and continue to apply a binary update to a build environment, you must use Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to sign in to the virtual machine (VM) environment. Then follow these steps:
Two weeks back, Microsoft had published a blog post stating that deploying Dynamics AX 2012 R3 environments through Lifecycle Services has been temporarily disabled in response to WannaCrypt Ransomware. The system maintenance activity initiated to patch all AX 2012 R3 VHD images has now been completed with the exception of the Demo topology and environment deployments through Lifecycle Services has resumed. We will update the blog after the Demo topology has been patched.
Our priority is the security and health of your Dynamics AX environments.
The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the June release of Lifecycle Services.
With this release of LCS, you will no longer be able to delete packages that have been applied on an environment and are submitted along with an active service request. We were seeing issues where packages were submitted to be applied to a Production environment, but the package was then deleted in the background. To work around this issue, packages that have been applied to an environment and packages that are submitted as part of an active service request can’t be deleted.
The Manage incidents page has been updated to match the Submitted to Microsoft incidents page which you can access by clicking the Support tile in a project. Click the Project ID link to open the Project incident page.
Filing support incidents directly from the Manage incidents page is no longer supported. To submit a support incident, go to the Support tile in you project, and then click Submit an incident.
New fields have been added to the Describe the issue page to provide more detailed information for support engineers. These new fields are:
You can now synchronize task recordings as a test case work item in your Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) project.
After a VSTS sync is completed, a new option, Sync test cases is available on the ellipsis menu. If you select VSTS sync, the synchronization process starts and a test case work item is created in your VSTS project for each task recoding in your BPM library.
Notes about test cases:
Customers who purchase a Dynamics 365 for Operations or Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise Edition subscription can deploy a Tier 1 Dev/Test or Build environment in the LCS Implementation project which is provisioned for their tenant. Though the customer has admin access to the Tier 1 environments, these environments are deployed in Microsoft’s subscription because Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations is a service that is managed by Microsoft. The following guidelines ensure that the environments remain secure.
The security of your environments is our highest priority.
The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the July release of Lifecycle Services (LCS).
Last week, Microsoft released Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition Platform Update 9. After the release, we found a critical bug in the platform that was causing forms and tables authored using extensions to throw an error when they were opened. This was due to a bug in the compiler logic that generated incorrect code for forms written via extensions. This issue has now been fixed and a hotfix has been released on Issue Search as KB 4038216. In addition, all places where Updates 9 was made available such as the downloaded VHD on Connect ,Tier 1 and Tier 2 deployments via LCS and Update 9 package on Asset Library in LCS have been updated with a new build of Platform Update 9 (7.0.4612.35162) that has the fix for this issue. Anyone that has taken Platform Update 9 with an older build than 7.0.4612.35162 should take the update for this critical bug to avoid getting errors.
We have discovered a bug in the 'Apply Updates' flow in Lifecycle Services, where the step details are not visible in the 'Environment Updates' section shown in the UI when a package is applied to an environment. This issue will be seen for all packages applied using the Apply Updates flow on all types of environments. The final state of the steps (completed or failed) will be updated only after the package deployment succeeds or fails which is reflected in the environment state in LCS. There is no workaround for this issue at the moment. The package deployment logs will still be available through LCS and will reflect the state of the steps on completion of the package application.
We are actively investigating this issue and will be fixing it as soon as possible. We will update the blog post once the fix is released.
The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the August release of Lifecycle Services (LCS).
In addition to the cloud environments that are included in a customer's Dynamics 365 subscription, LCS implementation projects are available. These projects enable customers to deploy demo environments in their own Microsoft Azure subscription. Deployments can be done from the Cloud-hosted environments (CHE) page in LCS.
With this release of LCS, CHE enables customers to also deploy build and development environments (using the July 2017 release) in their own Azure subscription for development, build, and test activities. Customers are responsible for managing, maintaining and covering the cost of these environments per the terms of their Azure subscription.
In the August release of LCS, we have retired the combined multi-box developer and build topology for partner and trial projects and replaced them with separate single-box build and developer topologies. These changes apply to the deployments completed on the July 2017 release of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations release.
The build topology is called Build and Test and enables the deployment of a single build environment. The developer topology is called Develop and enables the deployment of a single development environment. Single environments provide more control over servicing and VM management.
In the August release of LCS, we have made a few updates to the environment deployment flow for customer implementation projects.
When an environment deployment request is submitted to the Dynamics Service Engineering team, the customer or partner has the option to slipstream packages during deployment to avoid applying them after deployment is complete. However, in many cases the environment deployment fails due when packages that are not valid are submitted to be slipstreamed. This results in customer pain and support incidents because the customer often has to wait for at least eight hours for the environment deployment to succeed. To address this, the following changes were made in this release:
Previously, when an environment deployment request was submitted to the Dynamics Service Engineering team, customers and partners were provided with a large list of data centers where the deployment could be stored. However, sometimes the data center that was selected was not ready for deployment and this would cause delays. With this release, only supported data centers will be shown in the list.
With this release of LCS, we have added a way for a customers and partners to request frequent status updates for the deployment of an on-premises environment. To request updates, click Refresh state.
With this release of LCS, partners will now be able to experience what it takes to implement, deploy, and operate the Dynamics 365 for Operations on-premises product by signing up for a Partner Trial offer. This is the same trial offer that gives access to a Migrate, create solutions and learn project for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Cloud version. Existing partners that have signed up for this trial offer will now be able to set up on-premises deployments. However, the learn version of the on-premises project restricts environment deployment to a single on-premises environment.
In this release, we have uploaded a latest version of the deployment scripts that customers can use to deploy an on-premises environment.
In the August release of LCS updates have been made to the usage profile sheet. These updates include adding data validations on inputs and refreshing the color scheme for the Microsoft Excel sheet.
You can export support requests that have been submitted to Microsoft. The support requests can be exported to Microsoft Excel from either the Manage incidents page or the Support issues page from the Support tile in a project.
With the August release of LCS, we have found a bug that causes package applied using the 'Apply Updates' flow to fail when trying to download the package in the pre-servicing stage. This issue is seen only on environments that are deployed with App RTW or App 7.0 version. At this time, there is no workaround for this issue. Resuming package application on failure will not address the problem.
We are actively working on fixing the bug and will update this blog post as soon as we release a fix.
The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the September release of Lifecycle Services (LCS).
With the September release of LCS, we have added support, including the new buttons Resume and Roll back, to roll back packages when package application fails. When a package application fails, we recommend that you first click Resume, to verify if the failure is due to instability if the step passes on re-run. If the failure continues, click Roll back to restore the environment to a good state.
When you click Roll back, the environment will be put in the state, Uninstalling package. This will roll back the code and the database to the state they were in prior to the package application. When the roll back is complete, the environment history will be updated with Rollback steps and Servicing steps. If the roll back fails, you can use the Abort button to manually restore the environment to a good state.
Previously, to save binary updates, you were required to first download the update and then upload it to the project's Asset Library. In the September release of LCS, you can save binary updates directly from the Update tile to the project's Asset Library.
The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS (September 2017, release 2).
Starting in September 2017, Lifecycle Services (LCS) will increase the release cadence from once a month to every two weeks. This is release 2 for September 2017.
Additional setup is now required to connect to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations virtual machines (VMs) through Microsoft Remote Desktop (RDP) and Windows Remoting (WinRM) has been disabled on all environments.
For more information, see Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, enterprise edition cloud deployment overview.
The Dynamics 365 – Translation Service now supports the simple JS file type as a source file for Dynamics CRM products in addition to .resx when you are submitting a Translation service request. You can create a source zip that includes JS files in the zip.
In this release of LCS, we have added a new tile, Globalization portal, to the Lifecycle Services home page. The globalization workspace provides localization services and information in a single location. You can use search to access specific regulatory content and review recently submitted alert information.
In this release of LCS, we have split the Translation service and Alert service into two separate tiles. This allows us to support a broader product mix for the Dynamics translation service, as well as streamlines service entry which reduces the number of clicks required to complete a service submission. Click the Alert service tile to access the service dashboard where you can view the requests that you have entered in the Alert service, plus the other alerts that have been entered in the specific project that you have access to.
You can enable this feature by clicking the Preview feature management tile on the Lifecycle Services home page.
Under Private preview features, select SharedToolAsset - Solution package, and then slide Preview feature enabled to Yes.
When an ISV creates a solution using the solution management package, for example Create project, and a user wants to publish the solution package, they can choose to publish for the organization or globally with managed access.
When the user selects to publish the solution package, a message will ask how to publish. If the user selects, Global, the solution package owner can then manage access to the solution and the solution package is marked with the scope of Global (restricted).
A user can add or delete the users who have access the solution package by clicking Manage access on the Tools menu in the solution management package and then adding or removing users on the Solution access management page.
Note: This functionality is only available for solutions where the Scope/sharing status is set to Global(restricted).
You can also use the version of a solution to control access.
Click the + icon to grant user access to the solution by adding the users email address on to the Invite user slider. Other related information will be defaulted in. Click Invite to complete the action.
A new user is added to the dashboard with the status Pending and an email notification is sent to them that states they now have access to the solution.
After the user has imported the solution to LCS, their status is updated to Accepted.
You can remove a user from the dashboard by highlighting the user to be removed and then clicking the dustbin (delete) icon.
The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS (October 2017, release 1).
The content for Dynamics 365 – Translation Service is now available. The Overview and User guide provides customers with the conceptual and procedural guidance.
Over the past couple of months, as the Microsoft Dynamics 365 branding changed, and SKUs were renewed, duplicate environments were often showing in projects. This created confusion around the validity of environments. With this release of LCS, we have fixed this issue so that only valid environments based on subscriptions purchased by the customer are shown in the projects.
With this release of LCS, we now enforce a check for custom work item types. Currently, LCS synchronization does not support custom VSTS work item types, so any VSTS project that uses a custom template can't be connected to LCS.
Using a purchased Azure subscription, customers and partners can deploy a Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition environment through the Cloud Hosted Environments feature in LCS. These environments are owned and controlled by the customer or partner. In the past, you could use the Activity monitoring page to view the usage and telemetry data that is used to diagnose issues and build a storyboard view of the system during a specific timeframe. The page could be accessed from the Environment monitoring link on the Environment details page.
Due to recent changes in compliance and security, the collection of telemetry data from environments that are hosted in customer and partner subscriptions will no longer be enabled. Going forward, the Activity monitoring page will be blank for these environments. This blog post is to notify you that in the next release of LCS, we will temporarily remove the Activity monitoring and Health metrics tabs from the Environment monitoring portal. You will still be able to access the performance dashboard on the SQL Insights page. We will update this blog post when we re-enable telemetry collection on these environments.
With a purchased Azure subscription, customers and partners can deploy a Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition environment by using the Cloud Hosted Environments feature in LCS. Due to an issue in the environment deployment flow, system diagnostics was configured incorrectly in environments that were deployed after August 30th 2017. Because of this, key features in LCS such as the Updates tile, Performance dashboards, and other features are broken. To verify whether your environment is impacted by this issue, use the following list of symptoms to compare to your environment.
Symptoms:
· System Diagnostics and Detailed Version Information is not available from the LCS Environment page.
· The LCS Environment page URL contains IsDiagnosticsEnabledEnvironment=false
· The logs in the local administrator %AppData%\Roaming\JobLog folder contains invalid algorithm specified errors.
To work around this issue and get the Update tiles, system diagnostics, and SQL Insights performance dashboards working again, complete the following steps.
To run the script without being prompted for input or shown any output, use the following command line with the correct file paths and password for the database user:
PowerShell.exe -NonInteractive -Command "& {C:\Temp\LcsDiagHotfix_EnvReg_20170929\LcsDiagHotfix_EnvironmentRegistration.ps1 -LogFilePath C:\Temp\LcsDiagHotfix.log -DatabaseUserPassword (ConvertTo-SecureString -AsPlainText -Force -String '<Password>'); Exit $LastExitCode;}"
This will produce detailed output in C:\Temp\LcsDiagHotfix.log and return a non-zero exit code in case of any errors.
We’ve been investigating reports that BPM search and Task guide help are broken.
The root cause is that our task guide search indexing mechanism at times will delete some entries from an index during index maintenance. This had been known to happen very intermittently, and we had been mitigating this by re-indexing individual task guide libraries. Recently after some scale out work to improve search performance, however, this has gotten much worse. As of last week, search against our global task guide libraries had stopped working altogether, both in the LCS client as well as from the Help pane in the web client.
We hope to have an initial fix that stops the index process from deleting entries available to deploy to LCS by early next week. In the meantime, we plan to re-index the global task guide libraries today to reenable search of those libraries. Additionally, we are actively working on longer term fixes to avoid the indexing problems in the future.
The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS (October 2017, release 2).
While BPM still does not support custom VSTS templates, in this release we have removed the blocking error and instead added a non-blocking warning. To avoid synchronization errors, we recommend that you adhere to the following guidelines when you customize work item types.
You can now use the Dynamics 365 – Translation Service (DTS) to create new translation requests or run the Align feature for XPP label files in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Retail product.
DTS now also supports the 2016 version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
As of platform update 12, customers will no longer have access to virtual machine (VM) admin accounts on development or build environments that are running in Microsoft subscriptions. This only applies to new deployments of platform update 12 environments, meaning that environmen.ts deployed before the update, but have been updated to platform 12, will still have admin access. We recommend that you redeploy update 12 environments because the shift to a non-admin development on the Microsoft subscription will become mandatory in the future.
Customers who want administrative access to deployment environments have two options:
To develop in a cloud environment, you need to remote desktop (RDP) to the virtual machine (VM) using the developer account. The developer account will appear as (builtin\User…etc) on the LCS Environment page as shown below.
Microsoft has made changes in platform update 12 to make sure this account has the privileges necessary to complete typical development and customization tasks in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations.
The Administrator account will appear on the LCS Environment page as (builtin\Admin…etc) as shown below.
The administrator account will not be visible or accessible if the environment is running in the Microsoft subscription.
Additional information
To enable development without administrative rights on a virtual machine (VM), Microsoft Visual Studio is using IIS Express as the local web server instead of IIS. IIS Express runs as the local dev user instead of a system service.
To restart IIS Express, restart Visual Studio or open a table browser which will trigger a restart.
