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About Erik P. Ernst

With my 28+ years in the Business Central/Navision industry, I am what others refer to as a "Dinosaur". Since I started with Navision in 1990, I've done almost everything in this industry, from end user, sales, training, support, project management, development, solution architecture and much more.

And I'm still doing it, because I love it.

I started the Navision Online User Group in 1995, now Dynamics 365 User Group and I have been a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 2004.

Here I mostly blog about the Dynamics 365 community, my experiences with Microsoft and/or the projects I'm working on, especially international projects. Or what every comes to on my mind or bothers me enough to wanna share with you.

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Blog - Monthly Archive List

Blog posts

How many Azure DevOps build agents do you need?

Erik P. Ernst

An important key to being able to automate your Business Central builds is to have a build agent, which will run you build pipeline and create your container, compile your app, publish it and run the automated tests etc. When you use Azure DevOps, then you have the option of either using the Microsoft hosted build agents or create your own agents. Using Microsoft's standard agents is easy and free, depending on how many minutes you use per month. Creating Business Central containers requires…
- 2020-11-9
- Original post
- 1430 views
- 1 comments
- 5 months ago
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Business Central - Days of Knowledge 2019

Erik P. Ernst

The first Days of Knowledge ended 24 hours ago. We had over 50 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central experts from USA, UAE, RU, NL, BE, FR, IS, CZ, DE and DK to give more than 500 participants two days of new knowledge about Business Central. I'm still trying to consume the experience. And thought that I would share with you how we made it happen. A little over year ago, Simon Bertelsen (CEO of RelateIT) had to idea about regional Business Central conference in Denmark on a Friday and Saturday…
- 2019-5-26
- Original post
- 5406 views
- 2 comments
- over 1 year ago
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Multi-level app dependencies tested

Erik P. Ernst

Two days ago, my fellow MVP Mike Glue wrote a blog post about multi-level dependencies between AL extensions . Here he wrote that if you had an extension (i.e. a common library) which was used by another extension, then if you wanted to test the extension in a test app, then you also need to include the library as a dependency in the test app. So instead of a simple hierarchy of apps, then lower level apps also needed to include the higher levels apps as dependencies. I didn't really like this…
- 2019-1-31
- Original post
Business Central on-premise: System admin. users are no longer free

Erik P. Ernst

Right before Christmas I saw a blogpost by Jeremy Vyska which got my attention. It highlighted some changes in the December version of the Business Central on-premise licensing guide In the October version a new license included a free CAL for an External Accountant user and one CAL for a System Administrator user. In the November version only a free one for the External Accountant. In December no free users are included! Jeremy also contacted Microsoft and got the answer that this was no mistake…
- 2018-12-28
- Original post
Days of Knowledge – New BC Conference in Denmark

Erik P. Ernst

In May 2019, we are inviting everybody to Odense, Denmark, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen. Here Dynamics 365 Business Central developers, consultants, sales people and infrastructure administrators will get 2 days packed with 33 sessions from experts in the community and Microsoft.
- 2018-12-18
- Original post
Professional Business Central Developers?

Erik P. Ernst

If you, like me, have been part of the Navision community since 1990, then you have seen a lot. 10,000's of members of Dynamics User Group (prev. Navision.net/NOLUG) have come and gone again. Some stick around and with time becomes dinosaurs like me. But a lot of them, we only see 1-3 months, then never hear about again. And while I don't know the exact percentage, but my guess that a lot of them, are no longer working with NAV. At NAV TechDays 2018 two weeks ago, my friend David Singleton and…
- 2018-12-5
- Original post
Extension dependency in Business Central is not without challenges

Erik P. Ernst

One of the common recommendations from both Microsoft and all the experts in our community is to create smaller modular extensions designed with either a single purpose or with a single functional area. Within software development this is often called Modular Development/Architecture. This has several advantages, compared to create large (monolithic) extensions. The smaller the extension (the module) is the more likely it is that we can the sell the same extension to multiple customers. It also…
- 2018-11-26
- Original post
Do you include test codeunits with your BC extensions?

Erik P. Ernst

Running Dynamics 365 Business Central in the cloud, means that we always have a system which is running the latest version. Microsoft will take care of the upgrades of both the standard code and any installed extensions. Before upgrading and upon any new build Business Central is being tested by running 10,000's of automated tests in the test toolkit. This test is done every time they build their code, and it checks that the functionality in BC works as it is designed to work. Besides the test…
- 2018-11-15
- Original post
Why you should care about the name of C/AL controls, actions and entities?

Erik P. Ernst

Having worked for a while now with Visual Studio Code and AL, I have made a number of page extensions, where I really wanted to say something bad, to who every decided it was ok to name something Control1, Control2 etc! How exactly do you know which control to use when they are named like this: Luckily, they are not all as bad as the sales invoice page but would say that especially this page would have been great if they had been named a bit more carefully back in the days . At least to me…
- 2018-5-23
- Original post
AL crash with Dynamics NAV 2018 CU5

Erik P. Ernst

Been out on a customer project last couple of weeks, so didn't have time to work on my own project. But this weekend is one of our many Spring holidays - Whitsun, which comes with Monday off. And the wife is working. So a little time to work on my AL project. Just needed to start by updating my development environment to the latest cumulative update for NAV 2018 - CU05. Using Docker that didn't take much time, neither did installing the new AL extension 0.12.20065 to Visual Studio Code. But…
- 2018-5-18
- Original post