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Dynamics 365 Plugin Assemblies. Single or Multiple? You decide!

Inkey, December 22, 2022 4160 Views

In most projects with Plugins, there will be an obvious need for more than one plugin. This brings up challenges for how to organize and manage the assemblies and normally will result in having to strike a balance between maximizing plugin deployment segregation, (A single plugin class per plugin assembly) and ease of deployment/visual studio project management (All plugins in a single assembly).

In this blog, we will see what the pros and cons of using a Single Plugin Assembly and Multiple Plugin Assemblies are.

Single Plugin Assembly

Pros:

• Easy to Manage over the lifetime of the project
• Easy to Deploy at any given time.
• Fast and efficient because the system only has one assembly to deal with.

Cons:

• Accidental changes in plugin will also be uploaded when we upload the whole assembly.
• If multiple developers are working, then there might be a chance of overwriting one developer’s changes with the other

Multiple Plugin Assemblies:

Pros:

• No chances of accidental uploads.
• Multiple developers can work together under different assemblies without overwriting each other’s changes.

Cons:

• Having more than one assembly cause more work to be done on the server, loading and cashing an assembly is going to affect the overall performance negatively.
• It will be time consuming to create a new assembly for each new plugin.
• It will also be difficult to configure and manage in the long run.

So, it depends on how we will be managing the Plugins, how we will be deploying the plugins between different environments. There is no restriction to use specific way, as per the need we can select which approach we need to select.

The former simplifies the process since only one plugin registration is required, and the later allows easy management of what plugins are being updated.

Hope this helps!

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