Power Automate: changes in the HTTP Connector
Have you ever used the HTTP connector with Power Automate? I think the naswer is YES because it’s (at least in my opinion) one of the most used in every real-world projects. The HTTP Connector has a trigger called When an HTTP request is received that permits you to trigger a Power Automate flow from external applications. In the past I wrote a post about this trigger where I’ve talked… Continue Reading...
Transition to using Standard Tests for availability tests in Azure Application Insights
In the past I talked about the possibility to monitor the availability of a Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant (or any other web resource) by using URL Ping Tests with Azure Application Insights. You can see the post at the following link. This type of availability test is also useful when using Azure Functions to avoid the cold start of a consumption instance, like explained in this… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the new SecretText data type.
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release (version 23) and the new AL language version 12 introdocues a new data type called SecretText. This new data type can be used to protect secrets in AL code from being revealed through debugging. SecretText data type will be usable as a: Variable value Return value Parameter value The SecretText type encapsulates a Text type. If… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Me @ Directions EMEA 2023
In a bit more than a month Directions EMEA 2023 Conference will start in Lyon. It will be as usual an interesting 3 days in which to meet Microsot Dynamics partners from all over the Europe and share experiences and knowledge (and obviousy make networking). I will be at the conference with the following 3 sessions: Creating high performance low-code workflows for Business Central: what’s… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release: measuring the impact of the new data structure
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release (v23) introduces important changes on the new data structure for table extensions (I’ve talked about that time ago here). Instead of creating a companion table for every tableextension object you have for a specific table (as we have until version 22.X), Dynamics 365 Business Central v23 will store all tableextension fields for a specific… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: attaching VS Code Debugger from client
One of the long awaited feature that you will see in Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release (v23) is the ability to oen a Visual Studio Code debugging session from within the web client for a specific customer production or sandbox environment. To simplify and speed up this process, a new option to open a local Visual Studio Code instance for the current extension and… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: start checking per-tenant extension (PTE) validation events in telemetry
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release adds the possibility via telemetry to immediately discover if per-tenant extensions (PTE) are not compatible with the next major release or with the current environment. This gives you (as a partner) the time to fix and refactor your code prior to breaking changes. More in details, from September 2023 you will have a set of new signals… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: using the Performance Toolkit to discover performance regressions
Probably many of you knows that Dynamics 365 Business Central has a tool called Performance Toolkit Extension (BCPT). This tool is useful to test performances of a Dynamics 365 Business Central environment and to discover how your code changes can impact them. How to (I) use the BCPT tool? The recommended way to start with the BCPT tool is to install the Performance Toolkit extension… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Query objects, AppSourceCop and breaking changes.
When developing Dynamics 365 Business Central extensions for AppSource, it’s mandatory to activate the AppSourceCop code analyzers in order to detect if your codebase is compliant with the AppSource rules. AppSourceCop is an analyzer that enforces rules that must be respected by extensions meant to be published to Microsoft AppSource. One of the feature of the AppSourceCop analyzer is that… Continue Reading...
Power Automate telemetry data with Azure Application Insights
Azure Application Insights is the Azure Monitor extension (service) for monitoring the performance of live cloud applications, collecting real-time telemetries and detecting anomalies. I think that everyone of you know that because this service is a foundamental part of a well-architected cloud solution and also for a well-architected Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP solution. But when… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Introducing ALDoc: a new command line tool for generating reference documentation for AL extensions
With the latest pre-release version of the AL extension, Microsot shipped a tool called ALDoc for generating reference documentation for AL extensions. The ALDoc tool generates documentation from symbolic and syntactical information, code comments, and overall application structure based on input .app file(s) and it permits also to generate an help site (private or public) with these reference… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the new AllowInCustomization field property
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release (version 23) will introduce the possibility to add any existing table field to a page via page customization (by users for their pages or by admins for a specific profile). This feature will be launched in the October release and listed as a “preview”. More in details, the feature plans are the following: From the Business Central web… Continue Reading...
Dataverse environment creation: use Powershell!
When you need to create a new Dataverse environment for a project, the classical way I see quite everyone doing is by going to the Power Platform Admin Center (https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com) and create a new environment from here: This is usually fine, but sometimes this method has a limitation that can have an impact on your project. When you create a new Dataverse… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry with Azure Managed Grafana: Private Access Setup
Probably many of you knows that for creating control dashboards for some Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenants of for ISV apps I use Azure Managed Grafana, a managed service that enables you to run Grafana natively within the Azure cloud platform. I’ve blogged in the past here and here and I’ve also shared a free dashboard template. For supporting enterprise-level security also for… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 2 release: will it be the fastest release so far?
Some days ago Microsoft publicly releases the Release Wave 2 plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform products and also the Dynamics 365 Business Central Team announces the plans for the upcoming wave. There are lots of interesting features in this list, but I want to put the emphasys on some of them that can appear minor features but instead in my personal opinion they can change… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Power Apps and secure implicit connections
When working with data connections in Power Apps, you can have “implicitly” or “explicitly” shared connections to external resources. An explicitly shared connection means that the end user of the application must authenticate to the back-end data source with their own explicit credentials. Usually this authentication happens behind the scenes as part of Azure Active Directory or… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: the strange “service optimization” message
I’ve received privately on LinkedIn the same question from some partners regarding the following message that sometimes could appear on some Dynamics 365 Business Central environments: What is this message? This message normally appears on the following situations: During the tenant update window for deploying hotfixes to the platform components. During the working hours… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Dynamics 365 Business Central V23: page actions and the Scope property
I think that every Dynamics 365 Business Central developer knows that you can add actions to a page object. Actions permits you to execute processes starting from the selected page or record (like opening new pages, related pages or executing custom code). But I see that few developers knows that actions can only have a scope. With the Scope property of an action you can specify the scope… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: changes in the default AL runtime version
The capabilities and features of AL supported by a Dynamics 365 Business Central extension are determined by the runtime version. The runtime version supported by an AL extension can be specified in the app.json file with the following keyword: “runtime”: “11.0”. The runtime version specified in the app.json file determines which Business Central runtime the AL project is targeting. An… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetries for Azure Functions
In my Azure Functions session at latest BC TechDays in Belgium I spent some minutes showing the Azure Functions module in the System Application and how you can use it for calling Azure Functions from AL code in an easy way. Here is one of the example I used in the demo, where from an action in the Customer Card page I’m calling an Azure Functions from AL code for generating a QR Code… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Microsoft Azure Active Directory is becoming Microsoft Entra ID
About a year ago Microsoft announced the Microsoft Entra product family From its introduction, Microsoft Entra included three products: Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft Entra Permissions Management and Microsoft Entra Verified ID. Later the product family was expanded by adding also Microsoft Entra ID Governance and Microsoft Entra Workload ID. Today, Microsoft… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Using IP Firewall rules in Dataverse to allow only Dynamics 365 Business Central and your local network traffic
Microsoft has publicly announced in these days that the Global rollout of the public preview for the Dataverse IP Firewall feature is completed and it’s now available to all customers across all the Geos starting July 7th, 2023. Power Platform environment admins can now enable IP restrictions on Power Platform environments (available only for the Managed Environments) individually via… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Azure Blob Storage and immutability support for blobs
Azure Blob Storage is one of the common cloud-based storage for different types of application, included business applications like Dynamics 365 Business Central. Azure Blob Storage is commonly used to store unstructured data like files, PDFs, images or also things like audit logs. A quite common requirement that I see in different scenarios is to have the possibility to “protect” the… Continue Reading...
Azure Functions: how to debug remotely in production
Last week at BC TechDays in Belgium, I’ve received a lot of technical questions after the two sessions I’ve done. All of them was answered live, but some of these questions required also a more technical and detailed explanation and to some of you I’ve promised some blog posts in the upcoming weeks for answering. And this is the first… During my Azure Function session, one of you asked… Continue Reading...
Namespaces in AL: now it’s becoming reality
Namespaces in AL was one of the top requested features from a lot of time and now we can publicly say that they will be live soon because at last BC TechDays in Belgium Microsoft has officially unveiled the feature to everyone. Starting from Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 wave 2 release (v23, these are at least the announced plans) when you write an AL object, it will be decored with a… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Me @ BC TechDays 2023
I will be in Antwerp (Belgium) from June 21 to 23 for the BC TechDays conference. Hoping to see some of you there… As usual, here is a quick post summarizing the session that I will host there. The first planned session will be about Business Central and AI: I will have the pleasure to host this session together with Dmitry Katson and during this session we’ll show you the power of AI… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Power Automate and multiple record changes limitation
Last week I received a message from a partner with a problem related to Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Automate. The partner had a Power Automate workflow triggered by the “When a record is created” action of the Business Central connector: The workflow was successfully running from a lot of time. Now the partner implemented a procedure where lots of records are loaded into… Continue Reading...
Introducing Azure AD Cross-Tenant Synchronization
In the today’s cloud world is quite common that a company A has its own AD tenant with Microsoft 365 applications, Azure, Dynamics 365 apps and third-party applications. Company A sometimes can acquire a new company called Company B (or strictly collaborate with it) and Company B has itw own AD tenant with Microsoft 365 applications, Azure, Dynamics 365 apps and third-party applications…. Continue Reading demiliani’s...
I won the Digital Revolution Award 2023
Normally I don’t like to post personal things on this blog, but this time I need to do an exception because I think that I probably will remember this month for the rest of my life… Two weeks ago I was an invited speaker in Slovenia to the DynamicsMinds conference and during the conference the committee organized a community recognition for categories assigning an award to the people that… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central, Azure Functions and telemetries: best practices
Last week at DynamicsMinds conference, after my session about Azure Functions I’ve received an interesting question: in a context of a Dynamics 365 Business Central project, when using Azure Functions for handling integration tasks for this project, what are the best practices for handling functions telemetries? Should we send telemetry data to dedicated Application Insights instances or… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dataverse: introducing the new Elastic tables
I don’ know if you have yet discovered that, but some days ago a new table type option called Elastic appeared on Dataverse when creating a new table object: If you select this new table object, some limitations on what you can do are automatically applied: What are Elastic tables? Elastic tables (actually in preview) are a new type of Dataverse tables physically stored in Azure… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Azure Blob Storage: upload and download latency between Standard and Premium tiers.
Azure Storage offers several types of storage accounts. Each type supports different features and has its own pricing model. The most used types of storage account I see every day on cloud projects are the following: Standard general-purpose v2: standard storage account type for blobs, file shares, queues, and tables. Recommended for most scenarios using Azure Storage. Premium block… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Universal Code and Microsoft’s apps problems.
In these days lots of partners raised a problem appearing on lots of Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises customers after upgrading their licenses (I’ve personally received lots of requests on my socials about this problem by many of you, so I suspect that the problem is hot and not well known). The error appears after the user’s login and it’s something like the following: < div...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Power Automate environment selection and permissions
Until Dynamics 365 Business Central version 21.X, Power Automate flows that show up in the Automate group in a Business Central page were always sourced from the default (or first) Dataverse environment. With Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 release (version 22), a user can now select a Dataverse environment in the context of the Automate group and access flows stored in that… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Instant details of your Azure Subscription costs via CLI
Some days ago after finishing an Azure training someone of the attendees asked me to give more details about a tool I used to retrieve the costs of my different Azure subscriptions. As promised, in this quick post I share some more details about that. Before explaining the tool, I need to say that the Azure Portal offers a great Cost Analysis tool for analyzing the costs of your… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and SQL Server 2022
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 release (version 22) officially supports SQL Server 2022. This means that you can use the latest SQL Server version with your on-premises installations (and I recommend to do it). SQL Server 2022 has a strong focus on cloud-oriented features, giving everyone the benefits of innovations in the cloud without being force to migrate: SQL Server… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: underlying changes for PTEs
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 release introduces many new features on different areas, but some of them are quite hidden. One of them is related to per-tenant extensions (extensions that you developed in 50000..99999 range as a customization for a particular tenant). Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS runs in a multi-tenant configuration. In a multitenant deployment, information… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: AppSource submissions tricks
Dynamics 365 Business Central is actually the product with the large number of apps in the Microsoft’s AppSource marketplace (with more than 3500 apps currently published). To submit an app for Dynamics 365 Business Central in the AppSource marketplace you need to create an offer and then pass two validations: Technical validation:
Azure Service Tags and Dynamics 365 Business Central
Yesterday I’ve done a webcast detailing all the new features available in Dynamics 365 Business Central and I’ve also mentioned the possibility to manage traffic access restrictions to Dynamics 365 Business Central by using Azure Service Tags. A service tag in Azure represents a group of IP address prefixes from a given Azure service. Microsoft manages the address prefixes… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 and the new CRONUS license: what you need to know.
Dynamics 365 Business central 2023 Wave 1 release (version 22) comes out with the first version of a totally renewed and super-powered CRONUS license. The new CRONUS license is borned with ISVs and DevOps practices in minds and it will be available in the Docker artifacts and in the Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premises download package. < h3 class=”wp-block-heading”>What features the new CRONUS license…...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: RecordRef and the new SetTable parameter on v22
The RecordRef variable type is historically used in Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central to work with a record object when you don’t necessarily know which record you’re handling (the RecordRef object can refer to any table in the database.). RecordRef object has lots of methods that you can see listed and explained here. In this poist I want to mention these two… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Azure Logic Apps: KQL for having an overview of your scheduled workflows
Last week I was working with a partner on creating some cloud-based workflows for Dynamics 365 Business Central integrations with Azure Logic Apps. The partner has multiple Azure subscriptions and multiple workflows running on the different subscriptions and it raises the following requests: Is it possible to have an overview of all the workflows I have (and their state) across… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and .NET 6
The upcoming Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 version introduces an important server change: the NST server now runs on .NET 6. This is a huge improvement to the entire platform expecially in terms of performances and resource optimizations: Up to 30% faster AL runtime The NST is using less memory But this new changement has also an effect on partners: .NET interops with… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 release: hidden AL gems for Power Platform integrations
The upcoming Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 release (version 22) together with the new AL extension version 11.X will introduce some hidden new AL code-related features for improving the integration with Power Automate and Power Platform + Dataverse in general. For integrating Power Automate flows in Dynamics 365 Business Central pages, two new customaction types are… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Introducing Copilot for Dynamics 365 Business Central
Microsoft today has publicly announcedthe next generation of AI product updates across their business applications portfolio, including the launch of the new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot providing interactive, AI-powered assistance across business functions. Dynamics 365 Copilot takes advantage of recent advancements in generative AI to automate these tedious tasks and unlock the full… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1: introducing Master Data Management feature
The upcoming new Dynamics 365 Business Cenral 2023 Wave 1 (v22) release inroduces a feature requested from a very long time: Master Data Management. Master Data Management permits you to synchronize data between companies and maintain them in synch after the initial synchronization. Master data management is intended for scenarios where you want to move the setup in one company to another… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Analyze, group, and pivot data on list pages using multiple tabs
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave (v22) release introduces a new Analyze view mode in list pages directly on browser. End users and data analysts can analyze data from list pages directly in the client without the need to open the page in Excel or run a report. Analysis mode is a new way of interacting with data on list pages. Instead of running reports using different options and… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Azure Logic Apps: retrieving the exception details of an action group in a flow
In Azure Logic Apps (and in Power Automate too) to execute actions only if another group of actions succeed or fail, you can group those actions inside a scope. This structure is useful when you want to organize actions as a logical group, evaluate that group’s status and perform actions that are based on the scope’s status. After all the actions in a scope finish running, the scope also gets… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry – March 2023 Update
In these hours Dynamics 365 Business Central 2023 Wave 1 will join the public preview state and together with this upcoming new release also telemetries will receive interesting updates. As usual, Kennie has released a summary of the monthly updates here and you can also start downloading the March update of the Power BI telemetry app. With this post I want to put the evidence on… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: why not start stop using OnFindRecord or OnNextRecord triggers on pages?
OnFindRecord and OnNextRecord are two triggers available on a Page objects from ever. The OnFindRecord trigger overrides the default page behavior and enables you to specify which record you want to display when the page opens. By default, open pages display the last record shown when the user exited the page. You can use this trigger to override the default behavior and display the first… Continue Reading demiliani’s...