Using Azure File Share: best practices
Azure Files is essentially a fully managed serverless file share hosted on Azure accessible via the industry standard protocols like SMB, NFS and Azure Files REST API. Azure file shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments and they are extremely useful for replacing or supplementing on-premise file servers. In Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS scenarios, I think… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: transitioning from Delegated Admins to Granular Delegated Admins
At the beginning of this year I’ve shared a post explaining the new Granular Delegated Administrator privileges for Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. In a recent announcement, Microsoft has shared the final plan on transitioning from Delegated Admins Privileges (DAP) to Granular Delegated Admins Privileges (GDAP) and as a Dynamics 365 Business Central partner I think you need to be aware of… Continue Reading...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: quick reminder for some upcoming changes
October will be the month where Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Release Wave 2 (version 21) will be publicly available. But together with this new release wave and the next wave (version 22), partners should be ready for some upcoming changes that I want to remind. With Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2 (version 21): The Business Central Server Administration tool for… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: filtering telemetry signals with Azure Monitor Data Collection Rules
One of the main issues on using Azure Application Insights for collecting telemetry from a Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant is that it’s not possible to filters telemetry signals on the source. When you connect Application Insights to a Dynamics 365 Business Central tenant, all telemetry signals sent from Dynamics 365 Business Central are automatically sent to your Application Insights… Continue Reading...
Testing Azure Functions performances with Azure Load Testing
If someone of you remember, in the past I wrote about doing performance testing of Azure Functions using tools like Apache JMeter. Now, the Azure platform has a nice new tool (currently listed as in preview) called Azure Load Testing. Azure Load Testing is a fully managed load-testing service that enables you to generate high-scale load. The service simulates traffic for your applications… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: report extensions and global variables in preview mode
Today I received a call from a partner that was going crazy on a problem during the preview of some statistical reports in Dynamics 365 Business Central. The report was a custom modification of an existing one (done via a reportextension object). In this reportextension, the partner added some global variables used to perform filters and actions on the report’s dataitem, but the report… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Timer Trigger Azure Functions: handling retry policies
In my last post about serverless architectures for decoupling integrations between Dynamics 365 Business Central and external applications, I’ve talked about the usage of queues and Azure Functions for exchanging messages between different cloud applications. One of the quite common and simplest schema presented in the post was the following: In this schema there’s a Timer Trigger… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: queue usage to decouple your serverless integrations
In the last weeks I had lots of requests and discussions by partners in the Dynamics community asking for a better way to handle the reliability of integrations between external applications and Dynamics 365 Business Central in a fully cloud world. The scenario here is simple words is always the same: we have Dynamics 365 Business Central and we have an external application. These two… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2 release: what’s boiling in the pot
Today Microsoft has publicly released the planned list of enhancements for Dynamics 365 Business Central 2022 Wave 2 release (from October 2022 through March 2023). You can read the official list here. I saw some comments and reactions on the network saying something like “why so small news?”, “where are the big announcements?”, “very poor enhancements” and so on. As first, we need to…...
Azure Functions: getting the client IP address
When using Azure Functions, sometimes is required to log the IP address of the client calling your function app. Unfortunately, there’s not an out of the box way of doing that and sometimes I’ve found it quite tricky (just today I had this requirement on a customer site and they was not able to do that, so here is the reason of this post). To retrieve the client IP address of your Azure… Continue Reading...
Testing multiple Azure Functions apps running together with Microsoft Tye
If you frequently work with serverless architectures and expecially with Azure Functions, I think that you know that splitting a complex process in multiple “microservices” is often a good architectural choice. When using Azure Functions, sometimes could be quite difficult to test a serverless process that requires interaction between multiple function apps (components) during the… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: set up alerts on job queue failures
Some days ago I was with a partner for checking a Dynamics 365 Business Central project. This project has a big usage of Job Queue, with lots of tasks scheduled (business tasks and integration tasks). When I see such type of scenario I always want to analyze why there’s the need to schedule all these things and (expecially) if all these tasks should really need to be performed by the… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Do you have Azure Functions in production? Update your Azure Functions apps to use runtime version 4.x
On December 3, 2022, .NET Core 3.1 will be retired. As a result, Azure Functions runtime versions 2.x and 3.x, which use .NET Core 3.1, will also be retired on that date. A function app runs on a specific version of the Azure Functions runtime. By default, function apps are nowadays created in version 4.x of the runtime. If you have developed Azure Functions in the past, probably these… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: introducing the Dynamics 365 Translation Service Visual Studio Code extension (preview)
Have you ever used the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Translation Service (DTS)? The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Translation Service (DTS) is hosted in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS). It’s designed to enhance the experience for partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) when they translate their solutions or add a new language for supported Dynamics products. DTS uses… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
Dynamics 365 Business Central and Power Automate: conditions on empty field values
In the past days I’ve received the following question from one of my followers: in a Power Automate workflow, how can I test if a Business Central entity field is blank? Immediately after reading the question, my first answer was: oh, but that’s very easy… but after thinking a bit, I remember that there are also some tricky parts to know about these cases. And this is the reason of why I’ve… Continue...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: changing the way of sending tenant-level notifications
For some years now, Microsoft have communicated Dynamics 365 Business Central service health status and service incidents through the Microsoft 365 Service Health dashboard. Separately, they have sent email notifications about environment upgrades and compatibility of per-tenant extensions with upcoming updates to notification recipients that are defined in the Business Central administration… Continue Reading demiliani’s...
Dynamics 365 Business Central: handling a checklist for your apps
One of the onboarding features available in Dynamics 365 Business Central is the possibility to assign a checklist of tasks to a role in order to help users to complete setups or other configuration quickly and without forgotting things: When the user hits Get started on their Home page (role center), a checklist is revealed inside the banner. The checklist provides users with an… Continue Reading demiliani’s Article on...
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...