Uh, That's Strange

Hi,

Here's a weird error that I got two days ago while working on a new project involving microsoft dynamics crm 4 and microsoft team foundation server.

'Microsoft.Crm.Authentication.AnyOrganizationWindowsAuthenticationProvider, Microsoft.Crm.Platform.Server, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' doesn't exist.Parameter name: Microsoft.Crm.Authentication.AnyOrganizationWindowsAuthenticationProvider, Microsoft.Crm.Platform.Server, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35

At first, I thought that it was something I did that broke the system but soon I found out who is to blame. The strangest thing for me was the fact that this error message didn't come up in any google search that I tried. I understood then that I've hit a rare situation. Well, that was the moment I went to find out who is messing around with the servers.

It's a good momentin time to explain how we work here. I'm working for one of the few Microsoft Inner Circle companies that develope using Dynamics CRM in the world. We are based in Israel.

Since we are working on many projects simultaneously we have one database server which holds two instances of MS SQL servers (One for Hebrew deployments and one for English), two platform servers (one for each language) and many application servers as many as we need. The application servers are hosted using a virtual environment. This infrastructure means that we are working as a multi-tenant organization.

This brings me to the important point which is: what happend. Well, that's simple. We found out the hard way what happens when Rollup 2 is installed on one of the application servers. Apparently, it adds some new dlls to the deployment and causes all the other applications which are yet to be upgraded to break.

Conclusion: If you are about to install Rollup 2, take into consideration that you will have to upgrade all the applications that share that deployment. If you got that error then you have no choice other than to finish the upgrade task.

Good luck!