Handling Label Files in a D365FSC UDE Instance

Following up on some previous posts about D365FSC UDE development instances, I wanted to quickly write about a label file issue I recently encountered and how I addressed it.

Scenario

I wanted to install the D365FO Admin Toolkit into my UDE instance, after correctly setting up the project and getting the project to build, syncing the database, and publishing the solution I was seeing that the label files did not appear to be deploying correctly.

At first I thought I had forgot to build the label files but after checking the model build, I could confirm by looking at the CompileLabels.xml log file that the labels were trying to be built but none were being found.

That was especially interesting as Visual Studio was able to correctly find the label files and they were appearing in the Application Explorer.

Troubleshooting Steps

While reviewing the label compile log file from above, I noticed that the metadata path for the build was pointing to a temporary folder, this folder was actually being set via the ‘Manage Configuration’ menu in Visual Studio -> Dynamics 365 -> Manage Configuration:

I do not remember setting this folder path but very easily could have been something that was set at one point or during some update along the way.

In any case, the labels log file provided the command that was being executed to build the label files during the solution build. So I pulled that into a command prompt and executed it manually and got the same result.

Since this path is not where the X++ metadata path existed for this project, I modified this command to point to the correct path and the label file was found and compiled successfully. We can confirm this by looking in the output directory in the command to find the compiled output.

I then copied this manually from the output directory to the Resources folder of my solution metadata, built the project one more time and then deployed the model to my UDE instance and we now have the labels correctly being applied:

Possible Fixes

The process I did above is a temporary work around fix, but there are a number of ways to apply a long term fix:

1) You could change the custom metadata folder to point to your actual reference metadata folder path, but this may not be possible if you are managing multiple environment versions or you do not want customizations to be saved directly to your reference metadata.

2) You could add the command I executed above as a post build event for your solution – if you are going to go this route I would either recommend creating a symbolic link between the output folder to your metadata folder (so you don’t have to manually copy the compiled label files) or you could modify the command I executed above to output the compiled label files directly to your project metadata folder.

The post Handling Label Files in a D365FSC UDE Instance appeared first on Alex Meyer.

Original Post https://alexdmeyer.com/2025/09/22/handling-label-files-in-a-d365fsc-ude-instance/