CRM 2011 Rollup 12 - No More Freezing PC while Publishing

Paul Nieuwelaar, 18 January 2013

One of the most annoying little things with pre-rollup 12 versions of Dynamics CRM 2011 that I’ve noticed was that whenever you performed a task that produced a loading screen similar to the one above (most commonly while publishing) the whole computer freezes until it’s finished publishing, or whatever it was doing.

Other common scenarios are when you are updating an entities properties (such as display name etc), or editing an entity relationship (such as cascading behaviour). In all of these cases, once it starts processing, I often find everything freezes until it’s done. This is quite annoying as there’s usually other things to be done while it’s working, often outside of CRM.

Fortunately with Rollup 12 now, we’re not forced to wait for this to finish loading or publishing before we can continue using our computer. 

I’ve done a few tests on Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, to see what happens when we try and publish customizations now (note that the behaviour is exactly the same with updating entities or relationships). These are the results:

Using Google Chrome:
When you begin publishing, all CRM windows will freeze until it’s finished, however you can still open new tabs within the same browser sessions, and also continue using your computer as normal.

Basically, it prevents you from doing anything in CRM while it publishes, but you can still open another tab and check your facebook or work on something else while it does its thing.

Using Internet Explorer:
When you begin publishing, the current IE window freezes completely (you cannot open or navigate to other tabs). Other windows with CRM open will also freeze like with Chrome, allowing you to open and access other tabs from these.

In other words, your computer won’t freeze, just the browser window containing CRM. You can still open or use another Internet Explorer window to work on other things while it’s processing, but if you have other tabs open beside CRM these will also be frozen until CRM in finished publishing.