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 long serie of Dynamics 365 Business Central development training for partners and customers and during these meetings I’ver collected a serie of feedbacks/results from partners that I would like to share here. I…

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 Code permits you to create a recommended list of extensions for a workspace with the  Extensions: Configure Recommended Extensions (Workspace)  command: This command creates an extensions.json file in the .vscode…

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 use. Visual Studio Code doeas not read the GAC by default. You have to insert the path in the al.assemblyProbingPaths option as above. You should always specify the Version of the assembly (at least the…

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 emphasizing some aspects to keep in mind regarding upgrades and data migration. Happy reading.

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 absolutely need to have a good SCM system in place inside your organization. Normally during my courses I provide a practical overview of two systems: GitHub Azure DevOps Normally I emphasize the SCM…

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 (from your client machine to the Azure VM sandbox). To do that from your Azure Portal select the Resource Group of your Azure VM and then select the Network Security Group : In the Network Security…