Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise performances to the max with Azure SQL Database Hyperscale
When you’re start implementing Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise (because you’re not ready for the SaaS now), one of the good decision you can take today is to move your database to the cloud. I’ve written in the past different posts on when and why using Azure SQL Database or SQL Server installed on an Azure VM with Dynamics 365 Business Central (same is for NAV if you want). You can… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central + Azure Cosmos DB for globally distributed integrations
Today’s post wants to give an overview of a successfully deployed scenario of a geo-distributed integration between Dynamics 365 Business Central and some local B2B applications and it wants to leave a message to all: enlarge your vision to other Azure services if you want to create globally distributed architectures that rocks! The scenario: The headquarter of a large commercial company is… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and API calls limits – Stefano Demiliani
Is there a limit on the number of requests that an external application can perform with the Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs? I think that this is actually an undocumented response (please correct me if I’m wrong) but the answer is absolutely yes. As every well architectured solution, Dynamics 365 Business Central service limits the number of simultaneous calls in a certain… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
using OData V4 Bound Actions – Stefano Demiliani
I’ve promised this post to some attendees of my last Dynamics 365 Business Central development workshop in Microsoft Italy (c/o Microsoft House) last week. Question was: How can I call Dynamics 365 Business Central logic from an external application? Simple answer given by all: you can publish a codeunit as web service and use the SOAP endpoint. But if I want to use OData? You cannot… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
using DotNet assemblies on a Docker container sandbox – Stefano Demiliani
I think that everyone of you already knows that calling custom .NET DLLs in your extension’s code is not supported in a SaaS environment, but you can still use .NET assemblies in your extensions if you explicitly target the on-premise world. You can do that by adding “target”: “Internal” in your extension’s manifest file (app.json). This is not what I normally suggest to do on… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
My 10 tips/best practices for starting with Dynamics 365 Business Central extensions – Stefano Demiliani
About one month ago during the Dynamics 365 Business Central April ’19 release launch event in Microsoft Italy, I’ve presented a technical session to partners about how to start moving their existing solutions to AL and extensions. We saw practical tips and problems that you could find during this step and in the following weeks many partners asked me lots of questions about… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
direct extensions upload to a sandbox environment – Stefano Demiliani
Do you remember this idea? I’ve suggested it last year because in my opinion one of the noisy things related to Dynamics 365 Business Central sandbox environments was the lack of a direct upload of an .app file (manual deployment of an extension). I think that this is a need for developers, but also for consultants and customers that want to test an app before making it into… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
AppSource demystified – Stefano Demiliani
When you develop solutions for Dynamics 365 Business Central, you have essentially two roads for your extensions: Release it as a per-tenant extension (PTE) Release it on AppSource I’ve talked a lot in the past months about per-tenant extensions, their release process (pros and cons) and the pains connected to it. Per-tenant extensions should be seen as “customizations”… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
check page control names between platform upgrades – Stefano Demiliani
I’ve talked a lot in the past about pros and cons of per-tenant extensions (PTE) in Dynamics 365 Business Central. Despite Microsoft’s guidance (use AppSource) this is actually the most common way for partners to deploy their extensions on a SaaS environment and this is the recommended way for developing specific customizations for a customer tenant. Unfortunately, the partner’s live… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
improving the user’s search experience for your extensions – Stefano Demiliani
As you already knows, with the new web experience in Dynamics 365 Business Central the menusuite object is disappeared and the Search functionality is now essential to find the right object or function you need for performing a particular business task. Dynamics 365 Business Central has a powerful built-in search engine that you can start using by going to the Tell me feature (click on the… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and multiple cloud sandboxes – Stefano Demiliani
The new April 2019 release for Dynamics 365 Business Central introduced lots of new features and one of the most interesting is for sure the possibility to have more than one online sandbox. With this new release (platform 14) you will be able to create up to three sandbox environments at a time per tenant (with different names) and: You can choose to create a sandbox based on the… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
It’s time to evolve your ERP… – Stefano Demiliani
Do you remember the Fiat Panda 30? It was released in the year 1980 and it was one of the best ever car models released from Fiat. Fiat Panda 30 was one of the most appreciated models ever expecially because: it was a rock it goes everywhere (you can use it as a city car but also as a tractor) it was simple to maintain it just works (ready for every usage) But today, do you ever want to… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Bye Bye C/AL, welcome to the AL era… – Stefano Demiliani
This was in the air (Microsoft has clearly announced more than an year ago that in a year or so they will be ready to move their ERP codebase from C/AL to AL), something was under NDA and cannot be blogged but finally at Directions ASIA for the first time the plans were officially revealed in a clear way: April ’19 release (full of new features and with great improvements also in… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central CU04 and SOAP Web Services changements – Stefano Demiliani
As you already knows, Microsoft has rolled up in these days the Cumulative Update 4 for Dynamics 365 Business Central. Unfortunately, there’s an (actually) undocumented breaking change that has affected lots of customers: if you have previously published some codeunits as SOAP web services, after this update if you try to reference your previously published web services you can’t… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
online sandbox makes you crazy? Maybe remember these points. – Stefano Demiliani
There are many areas in Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS that are source of headaches for users and partners and I see often that one of that areas is the online sandbox environment. With this quick post, I want to try clearing some “foggy aspects” related to the online sandbox environment that I see every day and that generates noise and doubts/confusion: You can currently… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Azure DevOps for Dynamics 365 Business Central projects – Stefano Demiliani
Together with Microsoft Italy, we’re pleased to announce an full day of Azure DevOps overview for Dynamics 365 Business Central developers and consultants. Event details and agenda can be found here. In the first part of the day we’ll see a full overview of the Azure DevOps features, while in the second part we’ll go in-depth about the DevOps features and strategies for… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Using Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs in Microsoft Graph – Stefano Demiliani
2 days ago Microsoft has announced the availability of Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs in Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Graph is an interesting platform that permits you to have a unique gateway for REST APIs that spans across multiple Microsoft services (I’ve talked about it some days ago in my post about the interaction with Teams). Dynamics 365 Business Central is now one of the… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
how to create extensions now? – Stefano Demiliani
As publicly announced yesterday, the February 2019 Developer Preview for Dynamics 365 Business Central launches the first public version of the application where all the base code is converted from C/AL to AL. If you open the old C/SIDE Development Environment, what you can immediately see is that you’ve only few system tables and system codeunits but no other application objects: how to create extensions now? – Stefano DemilianiBlog...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Teams integration part 2 – Stefano Demiliani
About one week ago I’ve written a post on how to integrate Dynamics 365 Business Central with Microsoft Teams and after that post I’ve received a lot of questions (so surprised that the topic was so hot). My goal was to write a message to a Teams channel from Dynamics 365 Business Central because I think that (at least for my customer’s base) this is the most interesting and useful… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
how to integrate them? – Stefano Demiliani
Microsoft Teams is the new Microsoft’s collaborative platform for collaborative working and I’m quite sure that quite soon everyone of you will use this platform as a Skype replacement (at least for business). One of the request I’m receiving often is why Microsoft has not directly integrated Teams on Dynamics 365 Business Central. I agree, I think that this is something that… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Moving an on-premise Dynamics 365 Business Central database to Azure SQL via Powershell – Stefano Demiliani
If I have an on-premise installation of Dynamics 365 Business Central, can I move my database from a local SQL Server to Azure SQL by automating this task (no manual processing)? I’ve received this question in a forum some days ago and I remember that I had previously created a script for this task in the past. Today I’ve found it on my repos and it’s the time to share it 🙂 Moving… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and direct printing – Stefano Demiliani
This seems to be one of the hottest “problems” when using Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS: actually you cannot directly print a document on a printer, but you need to open the PDF file and then print from the browser. This could be ok for documents or for other not so repetitive tasks, but it could be a problem on scenarios like warehouse or production and so on, where you need to… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
extensions disappeared in Sandbox environment – Stefano Demiliani
I saw different tickets and questions related to the title’s topic in the last weeks and I think there’s the need for a clarification. I wrote a post some months ago by explaining the Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant upgrade process that Microsoft has in place (you can find it here) but there are some strange behaviours that start appear to partners and that must be… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
April 2019 release wave features – Stefano Demiliani
Microsoft has revealed to the general public the new Dynamics 365 Business Central features planned to be released in the April 2019 wave (from April through September 2019). Here a quick summary of what to attend (so be prepared 😉 ): Web experience improvements: New shortcuts Work date settings Company indicator Totals for lists Improved search Advanced personalization… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Object IDs things to know – Stefano Demiliani
I think that today everyone of you knows that with Dynamics 365 Business Central we have the following rules for Object IDs: 50.000-99.999: per tenant/customer customizations (no AppSource). 1.000.000-60.000.000: RSP range for partners that have an ISV solution for on premise / D365BC. When used in Business Central these extensions are obtained as apps from
Storing sensitive data for your extension? Use the Isolated Storage! – Stefano Demiliani
This is a quick post to signal a “worst practice” I’ve see today in a partner’s extension. This extension needs to save some private data and the partner has decided to use the Service Password table for that scope. The Service Password table is a particular table (ID 1261, present also in NAV) with the following structure: This table was born in the NAV era for implementing the
a UI for managing your Dynamics 365 Business Central/Dynamics NAV containers – Stefano Demiliani
Do you know what Portainer is? In simple words, it’s a simple management solution for Docker and it consists of a web UI that allows you to easily manage your Docker containers, images, networks and volumes. All is based on a single container that can run on any Docker engine (Linux or Windows). Have you ever thinked on having something similar for Dynamics 365 Business Central?… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central End of year 2018 Survey – Stefano Demiliani
During this entire year 2018 the Microsoft Dynamics ERP family has changed (and you know that for sure) and Microsoft has pushed a lot for helping customers and partners to “change their mind” and embrace concepts like Cloud, SaaS and Extensions. The new ERP era has a name and it’s Dynamics 365 Business Central. During this year I had the pleasure to work with Microsoft Italy for a… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
recommending extensions – Stefano Demiliani
There’s an interesting feature in Visual Studio Code that I see it’s quite unknown to all but that internally we use often when working with distributed teams: extensions recommendations. What is this? Everyone of you already knows that Visual Studio Code can become more and more productive if you add the right extensions for your work and your programming language. Visual Studio… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
things to know – Stefano Demiliani
I’ve written in the past how to use .NET assemblies in AL for your on-premise extensions and all is also officially documented here, but I think there are some tricky aspects that must be more explicited: In order to use your .NET assemblies (DLLs), in Visual Studio Code you need to set the assemblyProbingPaths option to point to the folders containing the assemblies that you will… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
upgrades and data migration “things to know” – Stefano Demiliani
Despite the Microsoft ERP proposition (on-premise vs SaaS), many customers are still full with doubts on what is the best choice for them: am I ready to switch to a fully cloud-based solution or do I need more time for this transformation? Can I switch to a fully SaaS environment at steps? What about data migration and platform upgrades? I’ve written an article for Simplanova… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Using Azure DevOps for managing your Dynamics 365 Business Central projects – Stefano Demiliani
All the people that were on my Dynamics 365 Business Central Development courses for Microsoft Italy (and that will be in the next months) already knows that one of the topic that I always I try to emphasize is related to source code management. Source Code Management (SCM) is a must to have when working with AL (code is now on files and not inside the database as in C/AL) and you… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Enabling Remote Powershell connections to a Dynamics 365 Business Central Azure VM sandbox – Stefano Demiliani
When developing with Dynamics 365 Business Central in teams, you could have in-place different sandbox environments for developing or testing and you can have the needs to deploy extensions to such environments in an automatic way. With an Azure-hosted D365BC sandbox (hosted on an Azure VM with a Docker container) you can publish extensions (.app files) also by using Powershell remotely… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and Search timeout – Stefano Demiliani
Are you using Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise and are you obtaining this error message when searching on a list? This is because your applied filters are returning a query result set with a too long execution time. With Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise there’s a “not so well known” setting on the Database tab in the Business Central Server Administration tool… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
Dynamics 365 Business Central is here and you should join me! – Stefano Demiliani
Yes… Dynamics 365 Business Central appears on the list of topics of the main Microsoft developer-oriented conference in Italy. From 27 to 29 of November, at Centro Congressi Milanofiori in Assago (MI) the WPC 2018 Conference will start. As always, focus on development topics (.NET, Azure, etc) and infrastructure/databases, but this year also sessions for Dynamics 365 product… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
permissions for downloading symbols – Stefano Demiliani
Preface: Credits to this quick post goes to my friend Duilio Tacconi. Some partners are start using Dynamics 365 Business Central (on cloud or on-premise) by loading company data from NAV installations (manually with tools like Configuration Packages or by using the Intelligent Cloud for automatically create a cloud instance from an on-premise one). When you’ve finished to setup… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
handling breaking schema changes on production – Stefano Demiliani
I saw many requests on forums in the last days related to one of the most noisy topic when working with Extensions in Dynamics 365 Business Central (SaaS version): how to handle breaking schema changes. The tipical scenario is the following: You create an extension (version 1.0) that contains a custom table with some fields and some keys and publish it. All is ok. Then, you create a new… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
the impact for partners and developers (my article for Simplanova) – Stefano Demiliani
As you already know, Microsoft Dynamics ERP’s family is having a big evolution this year. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is now the past, while the future is called Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Partners (and developers in particular) must be prepared for the change and in my opinion also all the management team of a classical NAV partner should know the change and shift… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
tips for best network performances – Stefano Demiliani
Many months ago I wrote a series of posts related to best practices to remember when deploying Microsoft Dynamics NAV or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise as IaaS with Azure. In particular: I’ve received lots of feedbacks and interests related to these posts and many of you were so kind to share with me their experiences. When talking about installing Dynamics NAV or… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
enabling in-client personalizations – Stefano Demiliani
If you are familiar with the user interface features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central in the cloud and now you have installed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise, I think that you (or your consultants and/or users) could have discovered a difference in the on-premise web client compared to the SaaS version: why I don’t have the Personalize feature but only… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
what happens to my third-party integrations? – Stefano Demiliani
In a real-world Microsoft Dynamics NAV implementations, is quite common to see integrations with third-party external applications. These integrations are normally based on three different technologies: Text file integrations (XMLPort) SQL integrations (direct access to SQL tables) Web Services or APIs integrations With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise you have the same… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
why I can’t find my C/AL page on Search? – Stefano Demiliani
This seems to be a problem for many partners and developers that have start working with Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise in these days and this is not actually well documented in my opinion. I think that you already know that when developing a page with the AL language extension for Dynamics 365 Business Central in the cloud, you need to set ApplicationArea and… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
licensing changes – Stefano Demiliani
As you already know, today Microsoft has officially launched the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise. This release introduces also an important change regarding licensing. As usual, we have two main licensing types: Perpetual Licensing: you license the software with permanent usage rights. Subscription Licensing: you license non-perpetual rights… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise released today – Stefano Demiliani
As announced at Directions NA, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise is relesed today and it’s available on now Partnersource from this link. From Partnersource you can download the classic DVD package, but you have also the option to download it from Docker hub. With this latest release, Microsoft Dynamics NAV is renamed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central on… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
how to start (my article for Simplanova.com) – Stefano Demiliani
My friends of Simplanova kindly asked me to be a “guest blogger” on their website. The topic of this first technical post for them is about how to start moving an existing ISV solution based on C/AL to the new extension model. This is an hot topic nowadays and I think it’s also the step that every Microsoft Dynamics NAV partner will have to do in the near future to move their… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their...
why don’t you resize your Azure VMs? – Stefano Demiliani
This post comes after spending two days working with some customers that have started to move all their on-premise infrastructure to IaaS on the Azure cloud. They have used Azure VMs for hosting their Microsoft Dynamics NAV databases and servers and they have sized the VMs by starting from my suggestion and increasing the size by 2 ? (“we want to move to Dynamics 365 Business Central… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
show/hide fields on pages – Stefano Demiliani
Showing and hiding fields on pages based on conditions seems to be a very easy task for a classic NAV developer, but with Dynamics 365 Business Central and the AL extensions I see very very often that this is a source of hours spent on calling all the saints in paradise. In order to avoid disturbing the saints, I’ll try to describe how to do that in Dynamics 365 Business Central with a… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
using the Event Recorder for developing – Stefano Demiliani
When you are developing an extension for Dynamics 365 Business Central and you need to interact with the standard Microsoft’s code, one of the hardest problem is detecting which event you can subscribe to (as you already know, you cannot modify standard code in the D365BC SaaS platform but you can only attach to events raised by the platform). For checking the published events and detect… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
publishing a web service from extensions – Stefano Demiliani
In these days I received a (not so common I think) request: how can I have an extension for Dynamics 365 Business Central that, when installed, it automatically published some pages as web services in D365BC? For doing this task, there are essentially two main methods: Create an Install codeunit and here create the web service instance by inserting a record in the Tenant Web Service… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central Development Quick Start Guide is out! – Stefano Demiliani
At the beginning of this year I was preparing the content for the first of a serie of workshops for Microsoft Italy about developing extensions for Dynamics 365 Business Central and during this period I had an idea: why not writing a new book about developing for Dynamics 365 Business Central? Something like a manual that can guide a developer with the essentials from starting a… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...