Why Managed and Unmanaged solution files are so mu

Question

I created solution in MS Dynamics CRM, then exported it as managed and unmanaged one. Decompressed both and I ran diff tool on customizations.xml files. And there are too many difference between them, it's hard to say what exactly what was changed and why.

Are these changes are crucial?

May I create managed solution just by changing value in <Managed> tag to 1 instead of 0? Will it be safe?

Answer 1

There is extremely poor documentation surrounding the specifics of the differences in managed and unmanaged solutions. From my personal experience there is a lot more metadata that is required when specifying a managed solution. For example, if an entity is managed, it has to include the metadata to say if you can add additional fields to the entity, or update the form, etc.

As far as are these changes crucial? One would assume they're crucial to define all of the metadata required to describe a managed solution.

Is changing tag to 1 instead of 0 possible? Yes. Is it supported/will it work?. No. There are lot's of undocumented differences in the XML between a managed solution and unmanaged. Just changing the Managed tag will in the best scenario bomb on import, and at worst, corrupt your CRM solution environment.

Answer 2

If you are shipping your solution to customer packaging a proper Managed Solution "with proper publisher and version" will be very critical part.

If you'll go deep into customization you'll understand that only changing managed tag doesn't really make a solution Managed in Proper Sense.

By Updating Managed tag you can install/uninstall solution from the CRM but if you'll get deep into proper usage of Managed Solution where you control at field level "which field will be customizable and which field won't be customizable" so that you can control CRM in such a way that other solutions which are being imported afterwards don't break your customizations, you'll start seeing the differences.