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…...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dataverse integration: it’s time to upgrade your connections
One of the coolest feature in Dynamics 365 Business Central is surely the Dataverse integration, a foundamental building block for integrating the ERP with Dynamics 365 applications and Power Platform. If you’re using Dataverse with Dynamics 365 Business Central, with the last 18.3 release a new announcement was present in the feature list: Client secret-based service to service… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: save report dataset to Excel
Dynamics 365 Business Central version 18.3 introduces a new interesting feature for report developers or consultants: the ability to export a report dataset to an Excel file for data inspection. Why should you use this feature? Because in this way you can inspect the data that is generated for a given report dataset and you can optimize your report data processing and the relative… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Data Administration
Related to the new storage policy post I’ve written some days ago, someone of you have asked if it’s possible to check with more details the capacity of each environment (like space used for every table anf for every company) and also if it’s possible to clean up data on certain tables without creating custom tasks. As a tenant administrator, the first place to check for space usage inside… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: start thinking on storing Blobs outside of the database
July 1, 2021 is tomorrow and, as previously announced by Microsoft, the new Dynamics 365 Business Central database capacity changes will start be applied. If you check the Dynamics 365 Business Central Admin center page, storage capacity usage of Business Central is represented by Database on the Capacity page. With tne new policies starting July 1, 2021, Business Central customers… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: how to create an online sandbox based on W1
I’m receiving a lot of time the same question: “how can I create an online sandbox with W1 version?” so I think that a quick post could help someone in the future with the same problem. As I think you know, when you create a new SaaS environment from the Dynamics 365 Business Central Admin Center, you can select the type of the environment (Production or Sandbox) and you can select the… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs Load Testing with JMeter
Yesterday I saw a Twitter thread asking for suggestions about tools for load testing APIs. There are lots of tools for doing load testing for web services and APIs (commercial tools, open source tools, “do it yourself” tools like Powershell, custom programs and so on) but that tweet was the reason that prompted me to write this post. One of my preferred tool for doing load testing with Web… Continue Reading...
Using Azure API Management to host your Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs
Some days ago there was a discussion on Twitter started by Waldo about how to document custom Dynamics 365 Business Central APIsd to third-party clients that expects standard documentations like OpenAPI. OpenAPI Specification (formerly Swagger Specification) is an API description format for REST APIs. An OpenAPI file allows you to describe your entire API, including: Available endpoints… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: SetLoadFields performances with reference passing or value passing parameters
I’ve written in the past some posts with tips on how to write code for performances and how to be careful on using too much table extensions on heavy used tables if you don’t want to affect the performances of your tenant. There are also some sessions and webcast that I’ve done on these topics during this year (DynamicsCon, webcasts for Microsoft and more). The partial records capability is… Continue Reading...
Exporting Application Insights logs with Continuous Export or Diagnostic Settings
I’m continuously emphasizing that for monitoring cloud applications (like Dynamics 365 Business Central) and cloud services, using Azure Application Insights is a must. For analyzing telemetry data, I‘ve talked in the past about how to use Log Analytics and the features available in the Azure Portal, how to use Powershell, how to use Power BI and more. But what to do if you want to extract… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: automatically update library apps when updating your main app
Yesterday I had a chat with a Partner that was stuck with a problem on some SaaS tenants. Problem can be resumed as follows: Step 1: They have published on AppSource a MAIN app together with a library app LIBRARY1. Step 2: They have installed the MAIN app on the customer tenant from AppSource and the LIBRARY1 app was automatically installed on the tenant. Step 3: They have installed… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: creating a DGML dependency graph for your extensions
Have you ever had the need or the requirement to create a graphical diagram of the building blocks of your extension? Personally, a lot of time. I think that explaining an overall solution architecture with a diagram is something that sometimes can help a lot. I personally use diagrams or UML notations a lot during the architectural phase of a software solution or a cloud solution (that… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: thecontextSensitiveHelpUrl parameter and malicious urls
This is a very quick post for signaling a potential problem when you distribute your apps (per-tenant extensions) to your customers without carefully checking your app.json file. When you create an extension with the AL:Go! command, the skelethon of your extension’s project is created and if it’s your first project the default name of your extension is set to ALProject1. This is the… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and .NET add-ins (part 2): why .NET Standard?
As a follow-up to this post, I’ve received some questions related to why we talked about .NET Standard if the future Microsoft’s goal is to use .NET Core on server-side for Business Central (more performant, lightweight, modular, cloud-ready) and if .NET Core is the supported runtime on Azure Functions. A .NET add-in in Dynamics 365 Business central runs in the context of the service tier…. Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and .NET Framework add-ins: it’s time to change
With Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 1 Microsoft is continuously moving the server to .NET Standard and if you’re using on-premises .NET add-ins that targets .NET Framework, you should start converting them in order to use .NET Standard. .NET add-ins compiled with .NET Framework won’t work in Business Central 2022 release wave 1. This message was quickly launched also recently and I… Continue Reading...
Why you should start considering Azure Batch for some of your Dynamics 365 Business Central cloud workloads
At the Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 Wave 1 Launch event, in his wonderful session about the Administration Center, Dmitry Chadayev (Microsoft PM) has described the improvements that Microsoft has made on the tenant’s database export feature. The improvements involved the underlying technology for having a more reliable and performant way of exporting the tenant database when this… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: native support for barcodes
When working with an ERP, using barcodes on different reports is a common practice and I think that every ERP should natively support using and printing barcodes (and QR codes too). Using barcodes with Dynamics 365 Business Central was quite easy in an on-premise environment (just install a font and you’re ready to go) but not so easy to handle on a SaaS environment, where you were not able… Continue Reading...
Deleting Application Insights telemetry data on-demand with Powershell
I think that everyone of you knows that telemetry is an important aspect to take into consideration when working with a Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant and I continuously encourage you to activate the integration with Application Insights for your production environments. In a post about this topic that I’ve written months ago, I’ve provided you a way to analyze telemetry data of… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central connector for Power Platform update
This is a very quick post just to notify all of you that are using Microsoft Power Platform with Dynamics 365 Business Central that the rollup of the new version of the standard connector is in place (I’ve talked about these new features on my session in Power Platform Bootcamp Italy event a month ago). With the new standard connector for Power Apps and Power Automate, you will find some… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the reportextension object
One of the noisy limitations on Dynamics 365 Business Central until version 17.X was the impossibility to extend standard reports. If you want to add a simple new field to a standard report, you are forced to create an entire new report (new dataset), maybe from scratch or (better) by manually copying the standard dataset into a new .al file and then modifying it. You cannot handle the report… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: ClearAll is evil, again!
When Dynamics 365 Business Central version 16 was launched, I remember that a weird problem was signaled to Microsoft related to the ClearAll usage in code. For who don’t know this (but who don’t know this?) the ClearAll() procedure clears all internal variables (except REC variables), keys, and filters in the object and in any associated objects, such as reports, pages, codeunits, and so on… Continue Reading...
Microsoft Universal Print is finally ready (yes, also for Dynamics 365 Business Central)
Today at the first day of Ignite, Microsoft has finally announced that Universal Print is finally available for everyone. Universal Print is the premier cloud print service available at scale to businesses and educational organizations, deployed in the cloud on Microsoft’s datacenters and available to customers who have one of the following Windows or Microsoft 365… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on their blog...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: per-tenant extensions and conflicts with standard Microsoft’s fields
Some weeks ago I received two emails from contacts where they submitted me two interesting “bad problems” that blocked them on Dynamics 365 Business central SaaS. Problems were the following: Field declared in a per-tenant extension that now has a conflict with a standard Microsoft Base Application field.Object IDs conflicts on AppSource apps. Field conflicts between Base Application and… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: are your AppSource apps ready for 2021 Wave 1 release?
As I think you already know, with Dynamics 365 Business Central 2019 release wave 2 (version 15) Microsoft has marked a set of different things as obsolete (ObsoleteState = Pending) and with the upcoming Dynamics 365 Business Central 2021 release Wave 1 (version 18) these obsoleted things will be removed. This process can have impact on your apps if you’ve not yet fixed the related warnings in… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: returning complex types from AL
I think that every AL developer dreams that a day AL will be a full Object Oriented programming language like C# or others. Unfortunately, AL is born from C/AL and its main purpose is to write business logic inside a business application like an ERP in the cloud, it’s not a language that will be used for writing every type of apps. But that is… don’t stop to suggest things, don’t stop to… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: SOAP and Basic Authentication deprecation
If you’re using web services with Dynamics 365 Business Central version, from version 17.X you should always check the notifications that pops up in the Web Services page because some changes are in place (and Microsoft alerts you about that): The first notification appeared from version 17 is related to OData V3 deprecation. You should never use OData V3 now and instead go for the V4… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: automatically import custom report layouts with extensions
Do you love reports? Personally, NO! But that is, as a Business Central developer I think that sometimes (forced or not) you need to work with reports in your solutions. As a quick recap, in Dynamics 365 Business Central a report layout controls content and format of the report, including which data fields of a report dataset appear on the report and how they are arranged, text style,… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Securing your Azure SQL Database with a private endpoint
Some days ago I discussed with some partners the architecture of a possible datawarehouse system for external BI analysis connected to Dynamics 365 Business Central data. They created an Azure SQL database where a “data sync” with Dynamics 365 Business Central was in place and they perform BI analysis on this external database. The raised question was after this work was: can we protect… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: point in time restore of a Production environment
Yesterday Microsoft has officially released one of the most requested feature for the Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS environment: point in time restore for environments. If you access your tenant’s Admin Center and select an environment, now you can see the following option: The new Restore option permits you to restore an existing environment from a time in the past, within the… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure made it to the Best Microsoft Azure Books of All Time
I’m happy to announce that our book, “Migrating Applications to the Cloud with Azure: Re-architect and rebuild your applications using cloud-native technologies”, made it to BookAuthority’s Best Microsoft Azure Books of All Time.As featured on CNN, Forbes and Inc. , BookAuthority collects and ranks the best books in the world, and it is a great honor to get this kind of recognition…. Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Batch API calls and max number of operations
The standard (and for what I can see most used) way of using Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs is by sending an HTTP request to the API endpoint for the selected entity one request at a time: But if you need to perform massive operations (like for example inserting multiple journal lines in a batch) this could be not too much performant. Dynamics 365 Business Central APIs (standard… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: the impact of tableextensions
I think that everyone of you already knows that when working with Dynamics 365 Business Central, table extensions are killers for performances. But how much? That’s a question that I’ve also done to myself a lot of time when working with partners or when creating my own solutions. Is there a “deadline” for how many table extensions can I create for the same table in order to not kill my… Continue Reading...
Using Powershell to retrieve your Dynamics 365 Business Central telemetry
Telemetry, telemetry, telemetry… this is an hot topic in your developer’s and admin’s life in the cloud. We have talked a lot about using Application Insights for handling the telemetry data of your Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant running in the cloud and in the last events Microsoft, me and others (like my friend Duilio) explained how to use two important tools for querying your… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: per-tenant extensions changes
Do you remember this slide? This was (and is) one of my most shared slides ever (from me, from third-party partners and also from Microsoft’s PTS team). This explained common problems on using per-tenant extensions on a SaaS environment: Now things are changed and this slide must be updated (it’s overdue) Starting from Dynamics 365 Business Central version 17, per-tenant extensions… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Moving Azure Functions from Consumption to Premium plans
In a demo at the Microsoft’s Reactor event in October I talked about the performance advantages on moving Azure Functions from Consumption to Premium plans when needed on certain scenarios. When you create a function app in Azure, you must choose a hosting plan for your app. There are three basic hosting plans available for Azure Functions: Consumption planPremium planDedicated (App… Continue Reading demiliani’s...