More than an year ago I’ve written this post explaining how to handle breaking schema changes on a production Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant . I think that every Dynamics 365 Business Central developer now knows that in a production environment you cannot remove objects or fields (breaking schema in the database) but all schema changes must always be additive. Despite this, I see lots of developers that does what I try to describe in this quick post. As first step, they create a version 1.0.0.0. of an extension that defines a new table object with some fields: Then, on…

Just in time for Christmas, I’m very happy and proud to announce that the book “ Mastering Dynamics 365 Business Central ” is finally out and available on Packt website and on Amazon in all the two formats (eBook and printed copy). This was a very huge work (my biggest writing work ever), we’ve spent a lot of time on writing this book for the Dynamics 365 Business Central community and I hope it will be helpful for everyone of you. The book has about 770 pages full of technical contents grouped into the following 18 chapters: Chapter 1: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central technical…

I’ve received (and I’m receiving too) a lot of emails and messages on social networks from many of you asking for news about the future activites that Microsoft Italy has planned for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partners during 2020, so I hope that a quick public post can help you on planning your future I cannot go too much in details for now (Microsoft Italy has a great staff that manages these things directly), but there are a lot of things that are waiting for you in this upcoming 2020. Here’s a quick list: We’ll continue the development training for partners. The Dynamics…

One of the common (and basic) way to create integrations between systems in Microsoft Dynamics NAV in the past was to directly work at the SQL Server level and create tables linked to SQL objects by using the table’s LinkedObject property. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV, you can create a SQL Server view , then create a table with the same name as the view and set the LinkedObject property to true . Magically, this table is “linked” to the view and you can see the view’s data from Microsoft Dynamics NAV. If this code works, why not using it also with Dynamics 365 Business Central on-premise? A…

When integrating external applications with Dynamics 365 Business Central, one of the classical way is to use APIs (standard or custom APIs) and then call the relative endpoints from the external application. As said in the past , exposing entities by using standard or custom API pages is the recommended way for doing integrations with Dynamics 365 Business Central. By using APIs, the schema of your integration is the following: Here, an external application calls a Dynamics 365 Business Central API endpoint by using simple HTTP methods and then it receives a JSON response from the ERP.…

During the last technical workshops done for Microsoft in Finland and Norway, I’ve discovered that many partners are doing (together with the customer) a lot of load testing and performance testing for their solutions and for the standard application in the online sandbox environment. Testing applications in the sandbox environment before moving them to the production environment is a good thing and in my opinion is something that should always be done: as a partner, you install your apps in an online sandbox, your customer validates the customizations and the features and then, when approved…