Testing Azure Functions or Dynamics 365 Business Central API calls performances with BenchmarkDotNet
In these days, for a big cloud-based project, I had the need to conduct an assessment of the different cloud services in use. In this project we have Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS and other different cloud applications (also on different cloud providers) connected together by using serverless processes, like in the following schema: For this project, we have a serverless layer… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: custom Onedrive integrations
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 (version 20) enhanced the integration with Onedrive for Business, the cloud storage service that is included in Microsoft 365. Business Central v20 makes now very easy to store, manage, and share files with other people through OneDrive with a set of predefined actions that you can have on some entities, for example Attachments: As standard, you… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Microsoft Reactor: Proactive monitoring of your Azure cloud applications
Are you interested on efficiently monitoring your Azure cloud workloads? Are you curious about all the monitoring possibilities (and more) available with Azure Monitor services? Are you interested on automate monitoring reporting? If so, I’m waiting you at Microsoft Reactor on May 6th to live show the power of Azure Monitor. Registration link is here. Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their blog Microsoft Reactor:...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: publish full dependency tree for AL projects
When working with multiple AL extensions with dependencies in a Visual Studio Code workspace, during the development phase it’s quite common to have the need to deploy a given project. Currently, however, if the NST server doesn’t have all the extensions that the project depends on, these dependencies must be manually traversed and installed, because dependency publishing only works if there’s… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: clarification about OAuth2 authentication in v20
In a recent event we had with the partners community on the new Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 release (version 20) we received some questions and requests of clarifications about Basic authentication deprecation. The reason of this quick post is trying to clarify what happens on Basic Authentication in Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS from version 20. As you know, Microsoft… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: runtime packages and resource exposure policies
Runtime packages for Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise are not a new concept. If you want to distribute your extensions and protect your intellectual properties at best, with Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise you can generate runtime packages that don’t contain AL code, but only the final artifacts used by the server at runtime (they’re like an app file without symbols and… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: embedded pages in Teams coming soon.
At Directions NA, Microsoft announced that Dynamics 365 Business Central will soon support the possibility to embed pages inside Teams and every Teams user will be able to access the ERP informations from Teams in read-only mode for free. No more Team Member licenses? False! Is this integration a surprise? Maybe not too much Satya Nadella announced at Inspire 2021 that in a near… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central, OnAfterLogin and Isolated Events
During trainings and/or checking different partner’s extensions code, I often see that partners adds business logic in the login process (user initializations, checking licenses and more). The custom logic in the login process is normally added subscribing to the OnAfterLoginStart event of the LogInManagement codeunit. To all the partners I had the pleasure to speak with, I’ve always… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the in-client Performance Profiler
With the upcoming Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 release (version 20), Microsoft has enhanced the AL performance profiler (available starting from version 19 only via Visual Studio Code) giving the possibility also to functional developers/consultants, as well as customer administrators and power users to capture a user flow from within the web client and view high-level information… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Azure tenant’s telemetry at your fingertips
Monitoring is an essential task for handling a cloud tenant at best. Azure has built-in features for monitoring a tenant, but sometime these features are accessible only to admins. How can you be proactive on problems? How you can enhance your tenant monitoring experience? How can avoid the access to the Azure Portal for handling the tenant’s telemetry? In this article (my session for Azure… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 loves Power Automate
Are you a Power Automate user? Are you using workflows to Automate your tasks in Dynamics 365 Business Central? If so, there are good news for you in the air… The next 2022 Wave 1 version (or version 20) gives you an interesting new feature: the ability to trigger a Power Automate flow directly from Business Central. What does that means? This new feature will permit you to create and… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1: introducing Excel Layouts for reporting
When introducing the upcoming features of Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 (version 20) I wrote that one of my favourite features of the upcoming release is the possibility to create Excel layouts for reports (standard or custom ones). How many times in real world projects a customer asked you to create custom exports in Excel in order to fill a pre-defined and pre-formatted Excel… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Querying telemetries from multiple Application Insights instances
During the last week’s Microsoft WE Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry webcast (day 2 of a 3 part serie) I provided some small “hidden tips” on using Application Insights and some of them was borned after requests from partners. One of the common request received (also after our session at last Directions EMEA) was how to perform telemetry queries cross Application Insights… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Start using Partner Sandbox Environments
At last Directions EMEA 2021 in Milan, Microsoft announced the future availability of Partner Sandbox Environments for Dynamics 365 Business Central. Now the future is here and you can start using them right now. But what are Partner Sandbox Environments? As a Microsoft Partner for Dynamics 365 Business Central, you can now buy the Dynamics 365 Business Central Partner Sandbox licenses… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Secure life in a Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant
Dynamics 365 Business Central has moved the ERP (core part of every corporate business) to the cloud and this was a huge step for many companies. A SaaS ERP simplifies lots of administrative tasks (environment creation, backup/restore, platform updates, management, and more) but also opens an important (and sometimes under-evaluated) topic: security. The world of business applications… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: quick clarification on resourceExposurePolicy
I’ve received this morning a private message from a partner pointing me to some Github discussions about resourceExposurePolicy and the possibility to download source code when allowDownloadingSource is set to false. I think that some threads on the Github repo does not reflect the actual changes and this is why I’ve decided to write this quick post. If you’re new to the… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 (v20): upcoming reporting changes
In my previous post about the upcoming new features that will be out starting from Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1 release (version 20), I’ve mentioned the reporting part as one of my favourite. The new features will be available starting from the April, but Microsoft in these days has started to reveal something to the public, so I can talk a bit about this. The first interesting… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and Granular Delegated Admins Privileges (GDAP)
In January 2022 Microsoft has released a preview of Granular Delegated Admin Privileges (GDAP) for Microsoft 365 workloads. Delegated Admins permits to distributors (Microsoft Indirect Providers/CSP Tier 1s) and Microsoft Partners (Indirect Resellers) to manage a customer tenant without using customer licenses (you can provide support and manage administrative tasks on the… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Azure AD app registration secrets: a quick script to check who expires soon
When setting Azure AD app registration for using OAUTH 2 authentication, you need to create a client secret: A client secret has an expiration date that now (from the Azure Portal) can be set to 24 months as maximum: The option “Never” (for creating a secret that never expires) is disappeared from the UI for security reasons and Microsoft doesn’t want that you create secrets with… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 1: what to expect
Microsoft has officially unveiled today the Dynamics 365 and industry clouds release plan for the 2022 release wave 1. The release contains hundreds of new features across the entire Dynamics 365 stack of applications, but here I want to focus on the list of planned improvements for Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Release Wave 1. As usual, there are investments on different areas and I will… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Business Central Universal Code initiative: are you really so surprised?
Yesterday Microsoft has officially presented the Business Central Universal Code initiative ( http://aka.ms/BCUniversalcode). For more details about this initiative, I suggest to read Waldo’s post here or my old post on Simplanova’s blog here. In summary, with this new offering, selling what is called “non-universal code” (alias extensions not targeted to work online) to new Business… Continue Reading...
Create a link to an Application Insights query programmatically
In our telemetry session at Directions EMEA in Milan we have presented how you can directly use Dynamics 365 Business Central to monitor its telemetries. We actually use this technique in many real-world projects and for one of them we’re doing something more in these days: We automatically send telemetry reports to administrators via email.We provide a link on the report to directly show… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: AppSource submission of library apps used by different extensions
Exactly about one year ago I’ve talked about the possibility to create Library Apps and submit them on AppSource. The original post is here if you want to read it. What is a Library App? It’s a normal extension (.app file) that your real extension (the extension you want to publish on AppSource and make it visible) depends on (dependencies setting on app.json file) and that you can… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central, Service-to-Service authentication (OAuth) and Task Scheduler
Just before Christmas I received a request from a partner about a feature that personally I never had the need to implement before (at least in this way). In the current Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation they have an API that permits to an external application to post records in a custom table and after that the application also creates a task in the Task Scheduler for processing… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central workflows: Power Automate or Logic Apps?
Serverless workflows are in my opinion an important piece of the architecture of a cloud-based ERP solution (and this is the reason why I’m pushing its adoption on different posts, training and speaking). Serverless workflows permits you to create complex integrations between systems by linking a series of serverless tasks together in a sequence defined by your business needs, without… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Cloud workflows: is the low-code approach always a good solution?
Last week I wrote a post providing a solution for interacting with files saved in an FTP server directly from Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS. As said at the beginning of that post, the solution was “what I think it’s one of the best solutions in terms of performances, scalability and reliability” and what we currently use on different cloud projects when we need to handle large… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: are you doing cloud data migration? Please sanitize your database before doing it.
I’ve decided to write this quick post after having spent some hours on supporting a partner in order to discover problems with a Dynamics 365 Business Central online instance. The partner has moved customer’s data from a Dynamics 365 Business Central v14 C/AL database (onpremise) to Dynamics 365 Business Central online. Migration was successful, but then he had a strange error on code when… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: handling files via FTP on SaaS
I’ve written lot of time ago a post on how to save a file from Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS to an FTP server. The solution can be found here. After this post I’ve received lots of requests about how to do the opposite: if someone sends me a file on an FTP server, how can I retrieve the file, parse it and then save the data into Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS? There are… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and PropagateDependencies
More than one year ago (March 2020) I wrote a post explaining a new propagateDependencies app property introduced with version 15.3 in the “hidden” Microsoft.Application app file. This property permits you to specify whether the dependencies of an extension should be propagated as direct dependencies of extensions that depend on this one. Unfortunately this property is only quickly… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: PTE + SyncMode problem and troubleshooting
I think that you know that Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 2 (version 19) introduced the possibility to do a forcing of the schema syncronization mode directly from the Extension Management page when uploading a new per-tenant extension. With this new option, it’s now possible to force any destructive table schema changes and circumvent the usual error when such changes are… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and availability tests
Dynamics 365 Business Central is an absolutely reliable SaaS service that runs on the Azure platform. It’s a cloud service with a global reach and scale running on one of the world’s largest hyper-scale infrastructures (Azure) with data centers in regions all over the world. However, despite the guaranteed reliability of the cloud service, moments where a problem can affect the… Continue Reading...
Monitoring Power Apps with Azure Application Insights
As a follow up to this post (and for completely answering here questions from Directions EMEA about this topic) here is a quick post to explain how to connect Azure Application Insights in order to monitor your Power Apps applications. The way of connecting your Power Apps to Application Insights is different between Canvas or Model Driven apps, so here are the details for each app type. <h3… Continue Reading...
Programmatically monitoring your Power Automate Flows
In my workflow session at Directions EMEA, we talked about how to overcome the limitations of Power Automate for creating enterprise-level workflows. Power Automate is a great solution for creating user-centric workflows, but for enterprise orchestrations or for highly available workflows, there’s more One of the question received post session was how to monitor a Power Automate flow… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: overriding the extension’s resource policy for a particular tenant
Last week at Directions EMEA I had the pleasure to meet and talk with many of you in person and it was nice. Thanks for your kind words and I apologize for those who had asked to have a meeting with me but due to lack of time and sessions overlapping we were unable to arrange it. Feel free to send me a message if needed. During these “unofficial talks” I’ve received a lot of questions and… Continue Reading...
Me @ Directions EMEA
Next week it’s finally the Directions EMEA week and the conference this year will be in Italy in the great MiCo Center in Milan. Just to reassure non-Italian friends when you’l see the conference center for the first time: there wasn’t an hurricane in Milan in the last days, the MiCo Center is just like that The roof covering is a “work of art” called “Comet” of 15,000 square meters…...
Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs and Data Access Intent
One of the greatest advantages on using Dynamics 365 Business Central on a SaaS environment is certainly the availability of a read-only replica of the database. I’ve talked a lot about this feature in the past here on this blog but also on events, webcasts and courses. In summary, objects like API pages, queries and reports can use the DataAccessIntent property in order to specify their… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: changing the way of throwing Errors
After the “What’s New” webcast I’ve done two days ago, I’ve received questions on some new features introduced with Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 2 (version 19) that (due to lack of time) I’ve presented quickly. One of these features was the new way of raising errors that you can use with version 19, alias the Collectible errors. I think that you have noticed that when you… Continue...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Trusted Apps list management
Starting from today, Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 2 (version 19) is available and all new customers will automatically get the latest builds of version 19 when creating a new tenant. On-premises product download links will be available on Partner Business Central later today on the following link:
Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the AL profiler
With the Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 2 release (version 19), silently a new hidden feature was introduced: the AL profiler. I’ve mentioned this feature on a blog post announcing my top new features for the v19 release and someone of you asked me for more infos. What is this feature? How can I use it? Snapshot captures now include a performance profile of the executed code… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and Excel Organization data types
About one year ago, Microsoft has announced the preview of the so called “Organization data types” for Excel and Power BI that add “connected data types” on top of the standard strings and numbers options. A connected data types (based on a shared Power BI dataset) gives you access to a lot of related information of your data. Once cells have been converted into linked data types, you can… Continue...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: cleaning sensitive configurations when copying production to sandbox
When working with Dynamics 365 Business Central on real projects, I think that it’s quite common to have the need to create a Sandbox environment as a copy from a Production environment. This is useful for testing purposes but also for some troubleshooting. You already know that you can create a new Sandbox environment as a copy of a Production environment directly from the Admin… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: new indexing features on 2021 Wave 2 release
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 2 release (version 19) introduces some new indexing features that you can use on your tables definitions from AL. Now you can: Define columnstore indexesDefine included columns in indexes Columnstore indexes were first introduces with SQL Server 2012. These indexes are very useful for data warehouse workloads and large tables. They can improve… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing resource exposure policies for extension’s code
I think that everyone of you knows that with Dynamics 365 Business Central extensions your code is by default protected against downloading or debugging. For managing this, in the extension’s app.json file there’s a property called showMyCode that allows the code to be debugged from other extensions when it has been published. The default setting is false and this means that debugging into an… Continue Reading...
Public Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 2 environments are here…
Starting from today, you can create new Dynamics 365 Business Central environments based on the 2021 Wave 2 release (version 19): Please remember that the newly created preview sandbox environment contains demonstration company data only. Trying the preview on a copy of your current production data is not yet supported and also testing the upgrade from your current version to the… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Azure AD authentication for Application Insights: how to use it and the impact on Business Central telemetry
Microsoft has recently announced the public preview of a new capability for Azure Application Insights: the support for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication. By using Azure AD, you can ensure that only authenticated telemetry is ingested in your Application Insights resources. By using this new feature you can now choose to opt-out of local authentication and ensure that only… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Sandbox vs Onprem Docker containers
I saw this question popping up frequently on different forums also recently: what are the main differences when creating a Dynamics 365 Business Central Docker container by using the Sandbox artifacts vs by using the on-premise artifacts? I think that every reader of this blog knows that with the BcContainerHelper Powershell module you can retrieve the latest artifacts of a particular… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Using custom C# code when creating Custom Connectors for Power Platform or Logic Apps
If you’re doing integrationw between Dynamics 365 Business Central or other applications and the Power Platform, I think that sometimes you have the need to create a custom connector. Custom connectors are useful when you don’t have a pre-built connector with a particular application or API and they permit you to create (and even share) a connector with its own triggers and actions…. Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise and SQL on Azure VM: reducing storage costs
If you search on my blog, I’we written in the past a lot of articles with suggestions and best practices for using Dynamics 365 Business Central (and Dynamics NAV too) with SQL Server installed on an Azure Virtual Machine or also with Azure SQL Database. Onmy personal recommendations, I’ve always emphasized the importance of using Premium Storage with SQL Server on a production environment…. Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: delegated admins and AAD guests users
When working with your Dynamics 365 Business Central online customers, one of the first thing you should do as a partner is to setup your employees on Partner Center and then assigning to them the permissions to support your online customers. For this task, they need to have the Assists your customers as role set as Admin Agent or Helpdesk Agent: Then you need to request a reseller… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 2 (version 19): what to expect
Today Microsoft has officially shared the 2021 Wave 2 Release plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. Here are the links to the external release plans: A different view of sharks Bing helps you turn information into action, making it faster and easier to go from searching to doing. What to expect for Dynamics 365 Business Central? We can finally share the exciting news… Dynamics 365 Business Central focuses on the…...