Failed Deployment for Plugins in MS CRM 2013 with ILMerge

Question

I developed a single plugin for on-premise crm 2013 (PreCreateOpportunityProduct - nothing special). In my visual studio crm solution I added a project (called BusinessLogic) that includes my generated Entities.cs as well as partial classes for each entity. Therefore I can encapsulate the logic for one special entitiy in one separate class. No big deal so far. Now I want to use those logic, therefore I add the project reference in my plugin project. I know that I need to merge all needed DLL's to one, so I added a post-build event to merge all dll's with ILMerge.

Overview of Solution / Project with used DLLs:

The post-build command looks as follows:

mkdir "$(TargetDir)Merged" 
"$(SolutionDir)Libs/ilmerge.exe" /keyfile:"$(ProjectDir)keypair.snk" /target:library /copyattrs /targetplatform:v4,"C:\Program Files (x86)\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\.NETFramework\v4.0" /out:"$(TargetDir)Merged\Flag.Plugins.dll" "$(TargetDir)Flag.Plugins.dll" "$(TargetDir)BusinessLogic.dll" "$(TargetDir)Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Proxy.dll" "$(TargetDir)Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.dll"
del "$(TargetDir)*.*" /Q
move "$(TargetDir)Merged\*.*" "$(TargetDir)"

The RegisterFile.crmregister:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Register xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/crm/2011/tools/pluginregistration">
  <Solutions>
    <Solution Assembly="Flag.Plugins.dll" Id="f4dff197-5b7a-e411-80c3-005056ba5a51" IsolationMode="None" SourceType="Database">
      <PluginTypes>
        <Plugin Description="Plug-in to PreOpportunityProductCreate" FriendlyName="PreOpportunityProductCreate" Name="Flag.Plugins.PreOpportunityProductCreate" Id="0f7bd0bc-2b7b-e411-80c3-005056ba5a51" TypeName="Flag.Plugins.PreOpportunityProductCreate">
          <Steps>
            <clear />
            <Step CustomConfiguration="" Name="PreOpportunityProductCreate" Description="Pre-Operation of Opportunity Product Create" Id="107bd0bc-2b7b-e411-80c3-005056ba5a51" MessageName="Create" Mode="Synchronous" PrimaryEntityName="opportunityproduct" Rank="1" SecureConfiguration="" Stage="PreInsideTransaction" SupportedDeployment="ServerOnly">
              <Images />
            </Step>
          </Steps>
        </Plugin>
      </PluginTypes>
    </Solution>
  </Solutions>
  <XamlWorkflows />
</Register>

Note: I am Deployment Manager + System administrator -> all permissions

When I click Deploy on CrmPackage project, the error

Error registering plugins and/or workflows. Plug-in assembly does not contain the required types or assembly content cannot be updated. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\CRM\Microsoft.CrmDeveloperTools.CrmClient.targets

Note 2: When I deploy the plugin.dll without merging all the other DLLs the deployment works like charm, but the plugin throw the exception because the BusinessLogic.dll is not known.

Can anyone help me with this issue?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I found the problem: I was merging too many files! In detail: It was the Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Proxy.dll and Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.dll. Those libs are already in the crm server GAC. After removing those files from my ilmerge command, the deployment finally works.

Here is the link which gave me the important hints: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/f/117/p/146347/326928.aspx#326928