Dynamics 365 Business Central: Extension Management page and the “Delete Extension Data” option
This is a very quick post just to help on clearing doubts related on a new flag that Microsoft has introduced on the Extension Management page in Dynamics 365 Business Central starting from the 16.5 update (but announced for general availability for version 17). If you try to uninstall an extension form that page, now you have the new Delete Extension Data option: This option is… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Creating lightweight Teams bots with outgoing webhooks and Azure Functions
Microsoft Teams is becoming always more a central point for the everyday’s work on many of us now and often having Bots on a Teams channel that can solve our queries could be helpful. Teams bots are “automations” that allows you to interact with conversations and they can perform tasks or call external services for you. As a preface to this post (for all the Dynamics 365 Business Central… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: adding partner’s telemetry on your apps
I’ve written a lot in the past about using Azure Application Insights for monitoring a Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant (you can read here and here) and the team is actively working on improving the telemetry features by adding always more and more signals. For a complete overview of handling the Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry with Azure Application Insights, I suggest also to… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central Sandbox Docker containers and multitenancy
I saw on different forums people having troubles on connecting to their brand new Docker containers created with the new BcContainerHelper module by using the sandbox artifacts (image of the online sandbox). The new module for creating Docker containers for Dynamics 365 Business Central (that will replace NavContainerHelper) is well explained on the Freddy’s blog, so for more details please… Continue Reading...
Handling the “HTTP 429 – Too Many Requests” error when calling external services
I think that many of you that creates integrations with external services could have the pleasure to know the HTTP 429 error: too many requests. The HTTP 429 – Too Many Requests response status code indicates the user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time (rate limit) to a given endpoint (API or web service). When you receive this error, normally a Retry-After header might… Continue...
Dynamics 365 ERP landscape report
Earlier this year, I was pleased to be asked to contribute my thoughts on the current ERP landscape for the twelfth annual edition of Nigel Frank’s Microsoft Dynamics Salary Survey. The most comprehensive study of its kind in the global Dynamics ecosystem, the report shines a light the skills, motivations, and sentiments of Dynamics professionals in the global partner, ISV, and customer… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Creating a local drive mapped with an Azure File Share for your files in the cloud
File Management in the cloud is always an hot topic when using SaaS services like Dynamics 365 Business Central. A common request that I always see popping up on forums or from partners and customers is if it’s possible to automatically save a file on a local drive from Dynamics 365 Business Central (or more in general, from SaaS applications). As you can imagine, from a SaaS tenant you… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
AL language and the “missing documentation” warning
Yesterday evening I’ve received a message from a user asking me if something has changed in the AL language extension. When he loaded an AL project in Visual Studio Code, he started receiving tons of information messages like “The procedure XXX missing documentation“: Is really something changed in the AL language extension? Maybe something related to the announced plans for XML code… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: loading demo data for your extensions
I’ve received in the last days a request from a forum user asking for a way to automatically loading demo data in an extension, maybe embedding a data file inside the extension package and load it when needed, for example during the install phase. Unfortunately you cannot embed data files inside your binary .app file and read them from the binary .app file folder structure. I’ve promised a… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: exploring page views with Azure Application Insights
I think that you already know that I’m a huge fan of using Azure Application Insights for collecting telemetry for different types of applications hosted in the cloud or hosted on-premise too. At my session at Ignite Tour 2020 in Milan I showed how you can fully monitor and debug an application hosted on Azure with Application Insights and Azure Monitor. Also Dynamics 365 Business Central… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 2 release plan: my favourite features
Microsoft has shared today to the general public the Dynamics 365 Wave 2 Release plan. These are my favourite Dynamics 365 Business Central new features that will be released in the Wave 2 2020 period (October 2020 to May 2021): Improved overview and management of the available database and file capacity: tenant administrators will be able to have an overview of the database and file… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Using Azure Logic Apps for creating a Dynamics 365 Business Central container on Azure Container Instances
A week ago I’ve written a post explaining how to create a Dynamics 365 Business Central Docker container on Azure Container Instances (ACI) by using the new artifact way. ACI permits you to have “container as a service” and so you can rapidly create and launch containerized applications in a serverless scenario. And when going totally serverless, a task that you could have the need to… Continue Reading...
Creating a Dynamics 365 Business Central Docker container with artifacts on Azure Container Instances
Azure Container Instances (ACI) is a great service offered by Azure that permits you to run serverless Docker containers in Azure with simplicity and speed, without having to provision or manage any underlying infrastructure. I think that this service can be extremely useful when working with Dynamics 365 Business Central too, because you can spin up a container in few minutes with all the… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Visual Studio Code and poor performances with AL language
I saw different posts on forums in these days about issues related to poor Visual Studio Code performances when using AL language and opening big projects. Microsoft’s recommendation for Visual Studio Code and AL are listed here and they recommend at least 16 GB of RAM, while 32 GB is the recommended way for large projects. I think that not everyone of you have 32 GB on a local machine… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Securing your HTTP triggered flow in Power Automate
This is a quick post for giving a response to a question that comes out in our latest Microsoft’s webcast about creating cloud-based workflows for Dynamics 365 Business Central. In this training I’ve talked a lot about the “When an HTTP request is received” action in Power Automate (and on Azure Logic Apps too) and how it’s extremely important on many scenarios, first of all for starting a… Continue...
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 4-steps webcasts ended today
Today was the last stage for this serie of 4 Microsoft’s webcasts related to Dynamics 365 Business Central integrations and DevOps. Thanks to all for joining these events! This was the last part of 6 free Microsoft’s training activities for Dynamics 365 Business Central Partners that I had the pleasure to handle with other 4 Microsoft’s guys. You can find the recorded sessions in… Continue Reading...
Auto-scaling your Azure SQL database with Logic Apps
I think that you know that I’m a huge fan of using Azure SQL database for your workloads in the cloud. With Azure SQL you can choose how many CPU you want to use (DTU), how much storage you need, and then you can dynamically change these parameters any time when needed. Obviously, in the cloud world an infinite power is also directly related to costs. As an example, imagine to have a… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: checking user permissions on specific objects
With the refactoring done in Dynamics 365 Business Central for better supporting the SaaS environment, is not quite easy to check if a user has a specific permission on a specific object. Permission Range table is now a system table that cannot be used on a SaaS environment, License Permission table does not give you specific user permissions and using the ReadPermission and WritePermission… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Nigel Frank’s new white paper sets blueprint for overcoming business challenges with Microsoft Dynamics technology
We find ourselves in a position where Microsoft cloud technology is in higher demand than ever before, but with uncertainty around the future, many businesses feel directionless and unable to commit to a long-term strategy. I was recently invited by Nigel Frank, the Microsoft recruitment specialist, to contribute some thoughts and actionable tips to its new Microsoft Dynamics business… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central, AL compiler and .NET Core
At the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Virtual Event yesterday a not so much emphasized slide appears: Yes, the new AL compiler is now based on .NET Core as default. There are 2 runtimes that the language server uses: .NET Framework.NET Core 3.0 .NET Core 3.0 is now the default runtime for hosting the language service (much more quicker and efficient, 3X performance gain)… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: obsoleting the WITH statement
As you ever used the WITH clause in C/AL or AL language? There are lovers of this clause and there are developers that hate using this clause (I’m in this second category), but despite every personal opinion the WITH clause is widely used in code and also in the Microsof’s Base Application. As announced at the Dynamics 365 Business Central Virtual Event, Microsoft is continuously evolving… Continue Reading...
Automating the creation of work items in Azure DevOps (from Powershell and from Dynamics 365 Business Central)
If you’re using Azure DevOps in yor organization for the entire product lifecycle, you know for sure that you can handle also all your project management activities by using work items, boards, backlogs, sprints and so on. I’ve talked about that in the past here. What personally we use a lot internally is the Work Items feature. By using work items you can track anything, from a task to… Continue Reading...
Sending Azure Alerts to Dynamics 365 Business Central
When working with Dynamics 365 Business Central (but also on Azure applications in general) it’s a best and recommended practice to send telemetry data to the Azure Application Insights service for centralize monitoring. I’ve talked about that in the past here. Have you ever received the request to monitor some Azure Resources directly from inside Dynamics 365 Business Central and be able… Continue Reading...
365 Saturday: Business Central Day
For the first time, this Saturday (May, 23) 365 Saturday will host a full day event totally dedicated to Dynamics 365 Business Central. The agenda below will take place according to GMT 0 Timezone respectively: 8:00 – Track Inventory with Item Tracking – Bandam Sairam 9:00 – Handling your Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant – Stefano Demiliani 10:00 – Business Central Flash… Continue Reading...
Read-scale out with Azure SQL and Dynamics 365 Business Central
In the last month I had the chance to test the read-scale out feature of an Azure SQL Database with Dynamics 365 Business Central. Others have talked about this opportunity in the past and I want to share here my experience. The Read Scale-Out feature permits you to have a read-only replica of your Azure SQL database and use that replica to perform read-only queries instead of using the… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: AL and the internalsVisibleTo property
Yesterday I was talking with a partner that developed an extension with a quite complex logic declared in a codeunit with visibility = Internal (so the object can be accessed only by code in the same module, but not from another module). Now they have created a new extension (dependent from the previous) and they would like to reuse the business logic declared on the main extension in this new… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Azure DevOps and cross-repo branch policies
In the webcast we had this Monday for Microsoft Western Europe about using Azure DevOps for managing Dynamics 365 Business Central projects, when talking about the best practice to set policies for your branches, there was an interesting question: can I create cross-repositories branch policies? Also programmatically? I’ve partially answered the question and this post aims to be a more… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: using Camera in AL
Curious thing… last week a follower asked my if it’s possible to use the Camera with Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS. My answer was obviously YES but he pointed me to a link on Docs where how to implement the Camera was explained, but only for the on-premise world (using the Microsoft.Dynamics.Nav.ClientExtensions assembly). Here it seems that you can do that only for the on-premise world,… Continue Reading...
My session at Global Azure Bootcamp 2020: 15 tips to follow when deploying Azure Functions to production
Thanks to all the attendees that followed my session yesterday at Global Azure Bootcamp 2020. We saw 15 tips that I suggest to follow when moving your Azure Functions from a development/testing environment to a real production environment on an enterprise serverless architectures. Slides and code samples are available here. The recorded session will be soon available in the room site
Dynamics 365 Business Central: using AL rulesets to customize code analysis
I think that many of you are familiar with this topic, but I’ve received today a question related to AL code analysis and I think that also a response here can be helpful. Every Dynamics 365 Business Central developer now knows for sure that in AL you can activate code analyzers for inspecting your code. You can have more info here and here. AL Code analyzers are the… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: loading Configuration Packages from AL (part 2)
More than one year ago I wrote this post on how to import directly from AL code a Configuration Package (.rapidstart) file. This code uses the ImportRapidStartPackageStream method declared in the “Config. Package – Import” codeunit as follows: I remember to have suggested in the past some possible improvements on this codeunit, like adding the possibility to import multiple files… Continue Reading...
Azure SQL Serverless tier: a way to save cost for your workloads in the cloud
When going to the cloud, saving costs while maximizing performances is always a goal to reach but sometimes also not so easy to achieve. I’ve talked a lot in the past about how to move your databases to the cloud, how to use Azure SQL Database for Dynamics 365 Business Central, how to optimize performances and also (if cost is not a problem and you want the maximum performances for your… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and unpublished extensions during an upgrade
In these days I’ve received some messages from partners (and I saw on forums opened questions too) that signal that, during the upgrade to 15.4 release of a SaaS tenant, some custom extensions deployed on sandboxes are unpublished. Is this a problem or a bug in the Microsoft’s upgrade process for the SaaS tenant? NO! This is not a bug! As I said many times on this blog (just search for… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS: save a file to an SFTP server (the Logic App way)
Yesterday I’ve provided a solution for saving a file generated directly from a Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant to an SFTP server by using Azure Functions. I’ve to admit that this is my preferred way because it gives me more freedom, scalability and adaptability. But obviously, that’s not the only possible way to do so. Today, I want to describe another possible solution,… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS: save a file to an SFTP server
In our recently released “Mastering Dynamics 365 Business Central” book, in the Azure Function chapter I’ve provided a full example on how to upload and download a file to Azure Blob Storage from a SaaS environment (this was one of the top request I’ve received on all my trainings this year). But many of you have also raised a new more request: in a Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS… Continue Reading...
A quick way to deploy your Azure Functions in the cloud
After my last webcast about Azure Functions, I received an interesting question: how can I quickly deploy a function to Azure? Or maybe to different Azure subscriptions or regions? We saw in the webcast how you can deploy an Azure Function by using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code directly. But Azure Functions have also a full range of continuous deployment and integration options… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Live sharing your AL code directly in the browser
In this terrible period where COVID-19 is changing our days (and our life) and where homeworking is becoming a must, I think it could be helpful for some of you to know that Microsoft has opened the preview of a nice Visual Studio Live Share feature. I think that many of you knows what is Visual Studio Live Share, if not please read this post I’we written two years ago. With Visual Studio… Continue Reading...
The new life with an app-based ERP
I’ve written an article for Simplanova website by summarizing the biggest technical changes that every partner should start thinking and managing in order to be able to work efficiently with the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central platform. This is my personal opinion but I hope it will be a good starting point for everyone in order to start thunking on how to change its internal… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: something more about dependency propagation
One week ago I’ve written a post about the new “proxy app” (Microsoft.Application.app file) introduced with the 15.3 version (you can read the post here). This app uses a new property called propagateDependencies that permits you to specify whether the dependencies of this project should be propagated as direct dependencies of projects that depend on this one. As you can imagine, this is… Continue Reading...
Using Deployment slots for your Dynamics 365 Business Central Azure Functions
In my session at Ignite Tour Milan in January I’ve talked (with a real demo too) about how to use Deployment slots when you need to deploy a web application in the cloud and you have the need to separate the production environment from a “testing” environment or a “preview” environment (for scenarios where you want that only some users can use the preview version of your application). I’ve…...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and the new Microsoft Application "proxy" app
If someone of you has installed or upgraded a Dynamics 365 Business Central database instances with the new 15.3 version, I think that you could have noted that a new Microsoft extension is appeared on the Extensions Management page: What is this Microsoft Application app? This is a nice trick that Microsoft has done to solve a noisy problem that you could have if you modify the Base… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: please always check AL warnings!
This is a quick post that want to describe a curious thing discovered 3 days ago. A partner contacted me on a social network (yes, I answer also on my socials but please don’t abuse on questions here, I have an email address…) and said me that he had problems on deploying an update of a per-tenant extension (big extension) to a SaaS tenant (the extension was previously working). The error… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 1: FAQ about updating apps for v16
I’m receiving a lot of questions from partners about what they will have to do for their existing apps in order to be ready for Dynamics 365 Business Central version 16. I’ve summarized here the Q&A: Does Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces breaking changes to my existing apps? It depends. Dynamics 365 Business Central version 16 has no major breaking changes like version 15 but… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 1: price management with interfaces
The upcoming Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 1 release (version 16) introduces the concept of Interfaces in AL. An interface is used when you want to decide which capabilities need to be available for an object, while allowing actual implementations to differ, as long as they comply with the defined interface. This allows for writing code that reduces the dependency on… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Something new about Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 1
As I think you know (I’ve posted this on my Linkedin account some days ago) you can now start testing your apps with Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 1 release (version 16) by creating a new online sandbox targeting the new preview version. Together with this new preview version, you have also a new AL language version (actually 5.x). When you start a new project with the new AL… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: obsoleting events
I’ve written a lot in the past about handling breaking schema changes on extensions and the best practice to use the ObsoleteState object property to signal to your developers or third-party ISV users of your extensions that you’re planning to remove something in your codebase. You can find articles here and here. Today I want to write a quick post for talking about events and about a worst… Continue Reading...
Learning DevOps for Dynamics 365 Business Central developers
In the next months Microsoft Western Europe has planned a series of one-day training events for helping Dynamics 365 Business Central partners on improving their development process by applying DevOps techniques. Official announcement is here: Dear Microsoft partner, Learn how to manage and ensure development lifecycle in the new world of continuous development using the latest tools… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and data compression
Yesterday Kennie Nybo Pontoppidan (from the Dynamics 365 Business Central Team) asked us an interesting question: do you use data compression on your Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise database? If yes, what type of compression? From the answers I can see that there are partners that uses data compression widely, partners that uses data compression only on certain tables and partners… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central Wave 1 2020: what I love and what I want
As you already know, Microsoft last week published the 2020 release wave 1 plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform document. This is the document that announces the roadmap for the next major releases of these products. Regarding Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, there are lots of interesting new features announced (or planned) and the things that I think will be… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: handling BLOB fields on APIs
I’m not a big fan of using BLOB fields on the Dynamics 365 Business Central database, but there are many scenarios where you need to handle BLOBs inside the database directly. As an example, imagine to have an application that handles different types of labels related to items and these labels are stored inside the Dynamics 365 Business Central database in a table called Labels. This table… Continue Reading...