We would like to implement plugin packages on all of our plugins, but the capability is missing on on-premises server. Our product has been around since Dynamics 2011 and it was developed onprem from the start. We have some big customers that still remain onprem and a lot of smaller customers have moved to online. We understand that the plugin packages are an important step ahead in the future since ILMerge has long been deprecated and Microsoft support does deny a support ticket if it's related to a plugin and ILMerge is involved. However, we cannot afford to maintain create two different products for onprem and online to fix this issue only.

The lack of plugin packages for on-premise potentially exposes the customers to legacy applications that have known security issues. For example, the BouncyCastle NuGet package version 1.8.9 is marked in Visual Studio as containing vulnerabilities. However, if I upgrade it to the latest package, the resulting ILMerge assembly is too large to be uploaded into CRM, and the deployment fails. As a result, the customer remains with this old package. Furthermore, ILMerge itself was developed with .NET 4.5.2, which has been deprecated as well. It's important to understand that even though on-premises customers are few in number, they are generally very large organizations and thus cannot be ignored. I therefore, urge the product team to look into introducing plugin package capability to the current CRM 9.1 version of on-premises as soon as possible.