When working with extensions in Dynamics 365 Business Central, you’ve always to keep in mind that you’re now in a complex ecosystem where you’re not alone and someone can breakes things. One of the sneaky problem you can have with different extensions on a SaaS tenant is related to handling commits of transactions. Let’s imagine to have an extension called MAIN_APP that has a business process defined as follows: Here the business process is composed of 3 steps ( ExecuteProcess1 , ExecuteProcess2 and ExecuteFinalProcess procedures). Before calling the ExecuteFinalProcess procedure…

When developing extensions for AppSource, every partner has its own licensing model. There are extensions that are free, others that are billed by users, others that have a fixed price for each month or year of usage and so on. Everyone can have its own way of billing their customers for using an extension. But there are also some extensions that are billed for the number of generated records on a period (electronic document transmissions for example often works on this way). For this last requirement, an ISV have the needs to know how his customers around the globe are using the custom tables…

This is a question that I’ve received many times and also this morning I had a discussion with a partner about that (and that’s the reason for this quick post). Using Azure Application Insights for monitoring your Dynamics 365 Business Central SaaS tenant is a must in my opinion, but Application Insights is not a totally free service. Application Insights cost is normally very low and you can monitor it by going on the Azure Portal, select your instance and then in the Configure section select Usage and estimated costs : From here you can see the details of how much your Application…

In the training I’ve done to some partners last week, when talking about performances I shared an example of an extension with 3 features that I think are not so well known but that have a significant impact on how your code performs, expecially on a SaaS environment. That extension used the following features: Partial record loading Temporary Tables QueryCategory The Partial record capability is a new feature available starting from Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 2 (v17) and I think it’s one of my top personal desiderata from years. This feature permits you to load only…

Azure Key Vault is a cloud service for securely storing and accessing secrets. A secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as license keys, credentials, API keys, certificates and so on. Starting form Dynamics 365 Business Central 2020 Wave 2 (version 17) you can start using Azure Key Vault service for storing your secrets and then retrieving them from AL code in a very easy way. To start using Azure Key Vault from AL, you first need to have an instance created on an Azure subscription. When created, the Key Vault has an url like the following: https:/…