Pillaro Dataverse Plugin Framework

Task-based framework for scalable, testable Dataverse plug-ins with exact deployment.

The Pillaro Dataverse Plugin Framework gives development teams a consistent way to build, deploy and operate Microsoft Dataverse plug-ins. It replaces hand-registered steps and large single-purpose plug-in classes with a task-based model in which every unit of behaviour is declared, validated and executed the same way, and in which the registration metadata lives next to the code it registers.

The framework is also listed on Microsoft Learn among Community Tools for Microsoft Dataverse .

What you get after installing

• Runtime settings — plug-in behaviour driven by Dataverse records, changed without a redeployment and cached so the lookup costs nothing at runtime.
• Autonumbering — concurrency-safe sequences with configurable format, digit count and parent-based numbering.
• Plugin logs — the full execution flow of every plug-in and task, with context data, execution time and nesting depth, stored in Dataverse and readable from the included model-driven app. Most troubleshooting stops needing a debugger.
• The Pillaro Plugin Framework app — a model-driven app for administrators to manage the settings, sequences and logs above, with security roles for read-only and full access.
• Worked examples — example plug-ins on the standard Contact and Task tables that demonstrate validation, runtime settings, autonumbering, related-record sync and logging end to end.

Who it is for

Development teams and partners who deliver Dataverse and Dynamics 365 customisations in C# and need deployments to be reproducible across environments. The framework itself is consumed as a NuGet package in the plug-in project; this offer installs the Dataverse-side runtime that the package depends on.

Developer tooling

The framework includes developer tooling for both new and existing Dataverse plug-in projects.

• Project templates — start a new Pillaro-based Dataverse plug-in project using the provided .NET project templates for Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code and the .NET CLI .
• NuGet packages — add the core framework and testing capabilities directly to existing C# projects through the Pillaro NuGet packages .

For installation instructions, examples and complete developer documentation, visit the Pillaro Dataverse Plugin Framework repository on GitHub .

Deterministic deployment

Plug-in assemblies, steps, filtering attributes, images, rank, configuration and solution membership are declared in code and synchronised by the deployment tooling. Running a deployment twice produces the same environment, and repeated deployments do not leave duplicate steps behind. Developers deploy locally with the same source of truth that an Azure DevOps pipeline uses.

Testing

A companion testing package runs functional tests against a live Dataverse environment, creating the data each test needs, isolating test runs from each other and cleaning up afterwards. The framework's own test suite runs nightly against a live environment.

Licence and cost

Apache-2.0, free of charge including for commercial use. The source, documentation and issue tracker are public on GitHub .

Before you install

The Pillaro Framework solution is the runtime layer and is installed first. The examples solution is installed on top of it and is intended for learning, demos and validating the framework — not for production environments.