Microsoft Dynamics CRM

So I'm trying to automate the deployment process for any Microsoft Dynamics CRM customizations that we perform.

Thus far, I've learnt the following things:

1. WCF does NOT play nicely with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
   
2. Apparently people rely on an external tool to register assemblies
3. There are two types of customizations. UI changes which annoyingly enough are called 'Customizations' and the second being assemblies deployed via 2.

Now, CRM to me is like SharePoint. It's an ASP.NET site that has all these extras that are loaded onto it. Since it's closed source, you need to be able to go around it. In order to automate deployment, we require a few funny tricks to be able to do it properly.

So far, I've narrowed it down to two steps. I need to run this PluginRegistration tool with two xml files to load in the CRM Customizations. Then I need to run my own custom application to load in and publish xml customizations.

Great, so how do I deploy it?

When I wrote my custom sharepoint package I wrote my own batch files that loaded and packaged everything into a cab file. They were pretty complex ... they didn't just run makecab. They also used scripting to do some automated things as well.

For this one, I'm thinking of using the SetUp Project for Visual Studio. I haven't done much of it yet. However, there are a few things that I see that I like already. I can output the results of any project into the project and it gets packaged. I also see that screens are nicely setup for me.

What don't I like about it?  It feels eerily restrictive. Each UI form has a set number of textboxes and radiobuttons that I can set their visibility. Their forms are dictated only by properties. I can only seem to add a certain number of forms. There's no designer for them. I can only enter code through CustomActions as well. I'm unsure how to do exception handling and for a silly little MSI app. But anyways, I'll need to run executables ... I'll need to run a lot of other things ... Just to see if this all works out. I'm wondering if it'd just be better for me to write my own .exe file to execute.